Mr Cardiff

The View from Here

The View from Here –    (1)  (2)  (3)

The View from Here – April 1999

Today I am on my bike.

I trundle down Broadway, stop at the lights. Hang a right at the Royal Oak – that’s where, six months ago, I met Luke Holland, associate editor of Stink of Shoe Polish; three issues later and he wants me to have my own column. The view from here is of gathering speed as I crest Beresford Road Bridge. I should concentrate on the road and the humps.

Fifteen humps later and I’m past the dilapidated ‘Ruperra’ and opposite the Maltings. At the junction to my left, the New Splott Market. Those boys did well. They bought an old disused wood-yard, set up a market, made a success of it, sold the land for mega money, moved to a larger site a stone’s throw away, and are still raking it in for all I know. On the old market site is social housing and a Lidl’s. Everyone seems happy. At this rate the new National Stadium will be built on time and the Rugby World Cup will be a great success. The sluice gates of the ‘barrage’ will be lowered and around the great lake that it creates, the Millennium Centre will bring world class theatre to Cardiff on a monthly basis; the Sports Village will become a reality; the Welsh Assembly will… no, that can’t become a success too; there would be nothing to moan about.

Before you know it, the humps are a distant memory and you are at the Magic Roundabout. The one with the traffic signs. Public Art. This must be the gateway to the Bay and the Bay is a hump free zone.

I’m cycling down to the St. David’s Hotel and Spa to watch the Red Arrows fly past. Have you noticed how a five star hotel can change things? Since it opened its doors a month ago, the St. David’s hotel has had a monopoly on Media events. Starting with a Variety Club Ball launch, the Welsh Labour Party leadership announcement, Diana Mohdil and live budget day links on BBC, annoying the locals with a post-midnight firework display and now those magnificent men in their flying machines.

Cardiff is changing very quickly. For industry read leisure, for old read new. The new Splott Market, the new Millennium Stadium, the new St. David’s Hotel and Spa, the new Millennium Centre. Was there the same buzz almost a century ago when they built the new Theatre? The only moment of civic pride that I’ve personally witnessed was Prince Charles, in his investiture year, turning on the fountain opposite the City Hall. I was ten years old, perched on my father’s shoulders and my abiding memory is of the collective groan from the massive crowd as Charlie flicked the switch and the Welsh feathers, recreated in water, rose all of four feet before being dispersed on the wind. Civic pride was quickly replaced by sheepish embarrassment.

Thirty years on and the marketing machine is a much more sophisticated beast. Failure is not on the agenda and not an option. I’m about to turn left at the Cardiff Bay Hotel with its new extension. The marketing machine here might be saying we know that we are not quite five-star, but we are swish and close to the centre. And which centre would that be? The centre of commerce or the Leisure centre? Even our local television channel HTV, has been sucked into the positive spin game. Oh brave new world! In the first episode of ‘Company of Strangers’, where the NCM building doubles as the Welsh Assembly, a character is drowned in a dock in the Bay. Impressive underwater photography of the corpse, the water is crystal clear and not a sign of a submerged supermarket trolley or a dead dog anywhere.

All this newness and positivity can rub off. I arrive at the St. David’s Hotel and Spa in plenty of time for the display. I’ve only seen the hotel from the Norwegian Church end of the Bay, and have always cursed it for dominating too much of the vista. Up close it is rather impressive. No way of me getting inside of course, and I can’t ever see myself being able to afford to stay a night; blame it on the pheromones induced by the bike ride, but today I am prepared to embrace the future, the trees outside the hotel are worth the cycle ride alone. Believe me they are weird. Suddenly, Prince Charles and the fountain seem part of the old Cardiff, a brand spanking hotel and the Red Arrows part of the new.

In a perfect world, the fly-past would have gone off like clockwork, but I got carried away and forgot that perhaps Cardiff is the same as it has always been. The clouds descended, the drizzle soaked us to the skin and I got the feeling that George Bernard Shaw was absolutely spot on when he described the Welsh as ‘Italians in the rain’. What was I thinking about? It is not buildings that make a city, it is the people. Who cares if the Red Arrows were grounded? The view from here is of mudflats and I adore it. I’ll cycle back now and tell Luke that I think I’ve got an angle for the column. It will be about people and their special place in Cardiff… and you can read it next month.

The View from Here – May 1999

At the height of the miner’s strike, you’d have most probably found the nine-year-old Rod Woodward in Thompson’s Park, swinging off a tree pretending to be Robin Hood. But then Rod Woodward has never been a political comedian. Barry Cryer describes him as ‘Pete Sampras with gags’, doubtless pleasing his father, the veteran Welsh sports journalist Karl.

Thompson’s Park is one of the secret parks of Cardiff. It lies between Romilly Road and Pencisely Road. Rod remembers his father buying him the perfect Errol Flynn style Robin Hood hat, and his gang who dressed in green. ‘It is a park you only go to if you know it’ says Rod. He has known this park all his life, and still comes here to mull over his act. It is a fair bet that when he is here his mind turns to the birthday parties that he had in the park, the football that he played, scary Death Valley and the Fairies Garden. ‘It is a wonderful place where nobody picked on you.’ The view for Rod is fantasy and family.

Starting with talent competitions, from Tonyrefail to Birmingham, when he was fifteen, Rod reckons that ‘before I left secondary school I had done a hundred gigs or so’. He remembers the careers advice tutor, who told him on hearing that he wanted to be a professional comedian, ‘That is something that you can do in your spare time – now let's think of a real job’. A real job would have been following his father into the family trade of journalism. On completing his A Levels he decided against it.

‘I was doing a gig in Cardiff Castle for the Variety Club and Arfon Haines Davies asked me if I’d like to be a warm-up man on Telephonin’’. Six years later and Rod is a rare thing – a working Welsh comedian.

Working on the assumption that ‘when you are young and green you just go up to people..’ he has the greatest respect for his comic elders and their guidance. He observes that ‘a lot of alternative comics don’t seem to have any craft to what they are doing’. His love of craft was instilled in him by his Grandfather who introduced him to Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra. ‘Useless human beings but great artists.’ This love of artistry means that Rod can talk as lucidly about Lenny Bruce as Bob Monkhouse and his hero Frank Skinner. This is what gives him his edge.

‘I’m listening to comedy all the time; in the car, at home, watching videos.’ On the rubber chicken circuit of corporate events and private parties, Rod is learning his craft in front of a three-generation audience. He wants the Grans to laugh as heartily as the twenty-something’s. To this end he successfully mixes new comedy with tried and tested quick-fire humour. ‘You need to give people punchlines’ he says ‘There is more to comedy than just trying to knock the establishment. People’s lives are run by politicians, the last thing we need is for them to rule our comedy.’ Every Rod Woodward gig is different and he goes on stage with only a rough plan of what he’ll serve up each night. He is mindful however ‘That I wouldn’t want to do anything in my act that was artificial. I’m always aware if the material is creditable coming from me. At the end of the day’ muses Rod ‘you are only as good as your last gig.’

He is of to the Edinburgh Festival again this year ‘to soak up the atmosphere’, but he rules out a serious assault on the coveted Perrier Award for at least another three years. At an age when most comedians are just starting out, Rod has been a working pro for six years. Ultimately his experience and care over the nuts and bolts of his act will stand him in good stead.

We stand in Thompson’s Park and Rod remembers his childhood when ‘you could always get a game of football.’ Nowadays he is a regular on the Football Dinner circuits working with football greats like Tommy Smith, Alan Ball and Norman Whiteside. He recalls having an irrational hatred of Whiteside for scoring against his beloved Everton in a F.A. Cup Final. Having now met the man, he no longer bears a grudge.

Having met Rod, you get the feeling that his quiet faith and love of people will enable him to go a long way in his chosen profession. He only occasionally has pangs of doubt and sometimes feels that his job is ‘worthless’. He is a man who would like to change or save lives; perhaps that is why he chose the role of Robin Hood all those years ago. My hunch is that he’ll have become a household name in British comedy by the time he is thirty, written a Booker Prize winning novel by the time he is forty, and discovered a cure for everything by fifty. He still wouldn’t be satisfied with himself..

If you do happen to see a Pete Sampras look alike next time you are in Thompson’s Park and he is muttering to himself, ask him if he is Rod Woodward. If he says yes, let him join in your game of football or ask him if he fancies a game of ‘Goodies and Baddies’; chances are he’d run back to his house and get his Robin Hood hat.

The View from Here – July 1999

Summer is a-coming in. It must be the festival season. I’ve run away and joined the circus; call it solstice fever.

A couple of weeks ago our tour came to Cardiff as part of the Roath Park Children’s festival of Circus and Theatre. I’ve loved Roath Park since I was a child. I’ve played football on the rec and rowed girlfriends on the lake, though my lack of athletic prowess meant that they had to do their share of oar work. Even now, if a friend visits the city for the first time, in good weather I bring them here. I make sure that we enter at the city end of the park. A tour of the greenhouse i s a must. Exotic flora, terrapins and, if you smile kindly at the park keepers, a cutting from your favourite plant to take home. The rose gardens are always a joy and, as your companion waxes lyrical about fragrances and colours, you sneakily lead them up a leafy incline; you hadn’t mentioned the lake! I t never fails to get a whoop of approval. ‘How far is it to walk around it?’ they ask. The answer, dear reader, is 1.2 miles. So I like Roath Park and I haven’t mentioned the Scott Memorial or the ducks.

The festival is taking place on the site of the, now defunct, Cardiff Open Air Theatre. Directors John Paul and Francis Maxey had assembled an impressive group including Cardiff’s own Splott Brothers and Risky in Pink. In total there were five tents set up and each venue offered something different. Workshops in circus skills, trapeze classes, storytelling, puppet making, a madcap Punch & Judy show from Manic and Panic and ‘A Fistful of Circus’, a Wild West show from Cirque du Pays du Galles. Everything seemed set fair for a half term of great fun.

The saying goes ‘never cast a clout ‘til May is out’; we were a few days into June and true to form the weather took a turn for the curly. We opened the gates on Wednesday morning but by midday it was bucketing down, complete with thunder and lightning lightshow. The site, only yards from Roath Park Lake and several million gallons of water, soon became a quagmire. Thursday morning and the weather became even more inclement.

The programme was heavily revised but not before the Sherman Youth Theatre became the subject of controversy. A ‘Children’s Festival implies that children will be present. The tent, full of bedraggled, steaming parents, children and toddlers weren’t prepared for the show that they were about to see. It is safe to say that a venue hasn’t emptied so quickly since the premiere of ‘Springtime for Hitler’. Perhaps it was the ‘HIV’ and ‘always wear a condom’ subject matter that offended them. Maybe it was the lazy production values, and as everyone is a critic these days, the audience voted with its feet. Twenty-five refunds later it was decided to cancel their afternoon reprise. Surely ‘Youth Theatre’ should be about ‘Gormenghast’ and ‘Titus Groan’ not somebody else’s agenda – most scripts will take a contemporary slant; plastic umbrellas bobbing up and down representing your friendly local condom, wasn’t what the kids had come to see. But by then it really didn’t matter, the mud was winning. At the end of the day Holly and Seeta, who were running the café dressed as pink, bespectacled angels, dived headlong into the mire. The site was looking like a training ground for Glastonbury Festival conscripts. I cycled to my parents and arrived looking like a drowned rat.

Friday morning and the organisers bowed to the inevitable, the festival would have to be cancelled. A deficit of eight thousand pounds had been run up, and with more rain forecast, it was decided to put a stop to the losses. The spirit among the performers hadn’t been dampened and most agreed to deferred payments and vowed to be back again next year. The takedown took most of the day and I was befriended by an Amazonian fifteen-year old who thought it was all great fun and wanted to run away with the circus.

Our next gig was Broadway. Broadway, Worcestershire, not New York, and it was hoped that the early strike would enable us to leave on Sunday. We were booked to appear on the Hunt field and the squire wasn’t having us arriving in the middle of a hunt so we left on the Monday as planned.

Even in the rain it had been good to spend a week in Roath Park. We tend to take our open spaces for granted but they are the lungs of our city – we should celebrate them more. Very early on the Monday morning our convoy was parked up at Lake level ready to leave as the Park gates opened. I won’t see Cardiff again for four months, by the time I get back surely the new National Stadium must be finished. We wait to leave, and look at the ducks. One of our number shouts ‘Now there is something that you don’t see everyday.' We look as he indicates the surface of the water. A dead, waterlogged seagull bobs near the shore, its death mask is one of surprise. It had been that type of week. Roath Park good; Cardiff weather bad. A week so wet that even seagulls drowned. It’s the festival season; don’t forget your wellies.