Surf Digby

His solo albums and ones with The Cross are decent too.

As in...... filmed in 2024? If so, fair play to him.

Speaking as someone that had Gobots (or Robo-Machines, as they were called at the time), and also had Pathfinder, that's a weird choice to bring back. Surely Turbo, Cy-Kill, Leader 1, Scooter, the blue futurist tank, etc. would be a better option?

The oily kind, where there's just mats and no ring.

She's not wearing a beret, so clearly not that French.

To this day, I've never played any version of SF2 in Blackpool. The first time I played it, when it first came out and was the hottest game around, was at Pleasureland in Morecambe. They had three or four of them set up with massive screens, and the controls on a sort of desk with a bench for you to sit on. As they weren't in the official cabinets, there were no instructions and the buttons were unlabelled, so I just got totally flummoxed by the six buttons and was quickly trounced. I think I was Guile.

I think the problem for a lot of us, is that we're starkly aware of how much it's slipped since we first went. For me it's similar to Morecambe. When I first went there, the pier was still there (albeit condemned because it was about to fall down), Bubbles water park and Frontierland were in full swing, and there were a shed load of arcades in what we now know was the golden era of coin-ops. Bubbles is now a mass of asphalt with no clear purpose, Frontierland is wasteland and of the 50% of the arcades that remain, they're just full of 2p pushers and wanky ticket scheme games. I only have one real memory of my first holiday in Blackpool when I was four, which was my Gran buying a load of sticks of rock, putting them in a drawer, and when we got back from the clubhouse (we were at Pontins), the drawer had several hundred ants in it, having the time of their life. The first holiday there I remember properly was when I was seven, and even though it must have looked run down in some areas (eg: the lido would have still been next to South Pier, ready to be demolished), I only remember it as a bright and colourful place, which is weird, because I also know that the weather was crappy on several days, because we regularly couldn't see the top of the tower, with one day the cloud being so low that we couldn't even see the legs, as if the whole thing had disappeared. We must have had some days of sun though, because I can remember being on an absolutely packed beach, trying to find a spot big enough for us to lay out our towels. The best things though were the original Doctor Who exhibition on Chapel Street (and not under the Woolworths building, as I'd convinced myself it was for years), and the amazing Professor Peabody's Playplace in the Winter Gardens. I've no idea how many times I've been to Blackpool. There was a day trip with the Boy's Brigade in the mid-80s, I went in February two years running in the early 90s to the Magician's Convention with my uncle, a long weekend with my mother and sisters when I was 13 (Pontins again, where I saw my first live Britwres show and ended up being captivated with seeing the wooden boards when it was being dismantled, as up until then I'd assumed the canvas was just pulled very tight, like a non-bouncy trampoline. I was also captivated by one of the Blue Coats, being 13 and all). I went some time around 2001 when my daughter was young and could only go on small rides, and again with her in 2009 when they had the new Doctor Who exhibition and there was still the bridge over the promenade from Bank Hey Street, there was a stag night, a weekend spent there for Replay in 2011 in a lovely guesthouse still boasting its late 80s/early 90s decor, and then a bunch of day trips, and random evenings from when I was working in Bolton. I think to really like the time you spend in Blackpool, you have to be someone that likes Blackpool. Also, the Fish Factory does a decent fish 'n' chips too.

The first time I took my son to Blackpool, we parked up near the football ground, and as we walked down a street of run down and boarded up guesthouses, he asked (in the loud voice of a child with no filter), "Were these hotels all bombed in the war?" I'm glad that I started taking him when he was young, and that he likes being there, because I can't imagine what it's like taking a teenager and trying to convince them that they'll enjoy themselves. That Glasshouse building is in a shocking state already. They should have just given the Sands building a touch-up

Me and the boy were in Blackpool last week for a couple of days, and we had a great time. Admittedly, this is largely down to him being young and liking the old buildings, and me having a soft spot for the place from going there as a child. Having decent weather helped too. We explored the shipwrecks up in Fleetwood, and then went and found the wreck of the Albana in Cleveleys. We did the ballroom and tower, Arcade Club, South and Central piers, took a trip down to St Anne's to marvel at how their pier hasn't been condemned, yomped over the dunes to Fylde to see the Spitfire, and finished off with a bag of hot sugary donuts. You are right about the disproportionally high number of people that look like they're from a very small gene pool though, and this was one of the first observations I made to my girlfriend when I got back. The Doctor Who exhibition was terribly disappointing.

You know Sarah is .... you know...... Yeah? If so, you've placed her rather high.

Is it bad that I saw Sunak in the rain and immediately thought, "He's trying to do an Obama"?

Well, there's worse things you could do.

Pulled from the depths of my memory from the Wrestling Photos thread, with tales of buying magazines with questionable covers.... In my younger days, before the internet diminished the need for printed literature, I set out to purchase a magazine that focussed on ladies of a more buxom nature. I'd carefully chosen a newsagent in an area where I wasn't aware of anyone I knew living, and had timed it perfectly so that there was only one other person in the shop when I went in, and they were at the counter paying. Once they'd left, in one smooth continuous motion, I swept round from the shelf of envelopes, grabbed the desired magazine and made a beeline for the counter. In the 3m or so from the end of the shelf, the shopkeeper decided that he was going to go into the back, and as I slapped the copy of Jugs onto the counter, he was replaced by (I assume) his daughter, who happened to be one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. She looked me dead in the eye, and I looked her dead in he eye, and we shared a moment of financial transaction with the blankest of blank expressions.

"Daaaaaad!" I wearily opened my eyes, having been out late last night, and shuffled across the landing to the bathroom. There was my son, trousers round his ankles, poo smeared all over the floor from where he'd stood in it and then seemingly done a Torville & Dean routine. He looks at me and says, "I think I've got diabetes!"