Mark Steel does one man shows in which he tells jokes and funny anecdotes but it’s probably more accurate to think of him as a raconteur rather than as a stand up comic. He prefers stories and mini-lectures to punch lines.
In 2001, he wrote a kind of autobiography called Reasons To Be Cheerful in which he was happy to be identified as a “dedicated trouble maker”. Until fairly recently he was a prominent member of the Socialist Worker’s Party (he resigned in 2007) and makes no secret of his left wing beliefs. But rather than sloganeering, his political philosophy is apparent from his unpretentious endorsement of common values and a fondness for debunking academia.
In his series The Mark Steel Solution broadcast on BBC radio 4 & 5 between 1992-6 he delivered scripted lectures to prove that arguments could be made to support even the most surreal and/or provocative points of view . Topics included ‘Pessimists should be persecuted by law’ , ‘The Royal Family should be chosen by weekly lottery’ and, my favourite, : ‘Nobody should go to school until they are 35’.
In 1998, his lectures were on social and political revolutions and from 2003-6 he lectured on famous historical figures from Lord Byron to Che Guevara.
‘Mark Steel’s In Town’ is subtitled ‘One Man’s Tour of Modern Britain’ and is based on a series of thirty minute shows he did for the BBC.
The book consists of light-hearted and affectionate essays based on some rudimentary research that entailed inviting comments on Twitter, consulting guidebooks, scanning local history books and, above all, talking to the sort of local people who would become members of the audience for each broadcast.
A prime target is what he calls the “virus of uniformity”; the insidious process by which towns tend to lose their individuality when their shopping malls and high streets begin to look alike. His book cocks a snook at the faceless corporations that engineer this standardisation of daily life. His goal is to identify “the elements of a town that make it unique are what make it worth visiting”.
What he discovers is that ,even in the most unattractive towns, there’s a groundswell of local pride; the attitude of people from Merthyr Tydfil in Wales is typical in that they hold fast to the belief that it “may be a dump but it’s our dump”.
The hippo of Walsall.
In Walsall, he discovers that the townsfolk have a curious affection for a concrete statue of a hippo in the shopping centre. A mint ball factory in Wigan is a celebrated institution in the town even though the sweets are practically unknown in the rest of the country.
Steel’s belief that “every town retains a soul” is most strongly tested by the blandness of England’s New Towns like Basingstoke, Crawly and, particularly, Milton Keynes. He also casts a cynical eye on unmerited attempts to romanticise towns or cities. Many articles about Birmingham, for example, are fond of pointing out that it has more miles of canal than Venice. Steel’s response is brutally succinct : “you may as well boast that that there’s more paint in a warehouse in Luton than there is in the Sistine Chapel”.
Other insightful observations include noting that “what unifies London is its complete lack of unity” and bemoaning “brutally functional” aspect of UK motorways.
A weakness of the book is that many of the gags tend to be predictable, particularly if you read two or three chapters at a time. One of the running themes of the book is the criticism of dire town planning with ring road systems that taunt visitors rather than help them reach their destinations. This is a fair point which he labours by returning to it several times.
This is, nevertheless, a good book to dip into although I don’t imagine that Britain’s Tourist Information Board will find many quotable lines for their brochures.
