STAGS, HENS & BUNNIES

A Blackpool story

Photographed over almost three years, Stags, Hens & Bunnies takes us into Blackpool’s hen and stag weekends, a carnival of cheap alcohol, costumes, bravado and voluntary self-destruction. At close range, Dougie Wallace finds the humour, darkness and social theatre behind the seaside town’s booming night-time economy.

He was pissing himself laughing, bollock-naked and cling-filmed to a lamppost on the promenade. It was broad daylight. People were snapping him with their phones and he couldn’t do anything about it. I ran across the road.

It was one of those daft moments: some guy on his stag weekend, wrapped in see-through plastic, his boots and jeans around his ankles, while a Welsh flag hung limply from the pole above his head. He had just started to break out of his cling-film manacles when his friends came back with a fresh roll to reinforce his plastic confinement.

“He should know better,” his pal said. “He’s been married three times before.”

When I passed by later, as the light was dying, he was still there. He had stopped laughing.

That was how it started, with one photograph. At the time, I was trading campervans up and down the country with my business partner, Camper John. I’d pick them up in Durham and sell them back in London to people planning their European tours. I’d cross the country to the Lake District and spend a night in Blackpool on the way home. I always felt there was a story there.

Blackpool is a dirty great whorl of debauchery, licentiousness, laughter, vomit, furry handcuffs, fancy dress and drunken oblivion. Marauding packs of brides and grooms, friends and family, arrive on a mission to consume dangerous, liver-crushing levels of alcohol. This is their rite of passage, acted out on the last night of freedom before the conventions and responsibilities of marriage, mortgages and children.

For almost three years I went back and forth from London to Blackpool, compelled to document this tribe dressed in torn and stained comic-strip uniforms and committing voluntary acts of self-mutilation. A train guard once told me, “Every town has its idiots. We import them. If they started with any brains, they leave them on the train.”

My guess is that their behaviour in Blackpool is not unlike any normal weekend for them, only amplified.

It helped that I had been a Blackpool local for a couple of years in the 1980s, before enlisting in the Scottish Highland Regiment. In the 1990s I returned with Glasgow Benburb Football Club. Back then there were no stag and hen dos, no fancy dress, just people out on the piss during mini-breaks. Knowing the place gave me a sixth sense. I could sense when somebody was about to get their tits out, puke in the gutter, or fall down and skin their knees. Somehow, I always found myself in the right place at the right time.

Every weekend, Blackpool is heaving with everything from bunny girls to banana men. Lassies dress up in togas with matching gold handbags and neatly arranged hair, giving it the full ‘when in Rome’ treatment. There are devil girls, pink ladies, Brownies and guys in drag, all stuffed into nuns’ and nurses’ outfits. Their T-shirts announce Johnny’s Last Night of Freedom or Up the Anus Ashley. Every group arrives with the same objective: to get as fucked up as possible.

The standard weekend equipment includes bridal veils, hen-night sashes, L-plates, shot glasses worn around the neck, straws with penis heads, handcuffs, angel wings, spank-me sticks and inflatable dolls. Poundland must do great business selling the kits, badge sets and temporary tattoos.

The only act of creativity comes when these cheap, mass-produced products are adapted to immortalise Jenny, Johnny, Sandra or Sam. You don’t have to be an expert in the semiotics of hen-night dress codes to see that these brides, L-plates and fairy wings are not cut from the same sub-cultural cloth as Bert Hardy’s stylised Blackpool Tiller Girls of the 1950s.

I became part of each individual group’s story: the Glaswegian with the flashgun, fleshing out a heightened reality and bringing out the ridiculous in every situation. With the camera, I sparred, ducked and weaved for the right angle, trying to catch expressions and emotions right in their faces and break the fourth wall.

The real challenge was being accepted into the narrative. In our anxious age of social media and celebrity culture, everyone seems to be a media lawyer, quasi-schooled in model releases and what you can and cannot photograph. A social distance has crept into everyday life. Snapchat selfies prove that you were there, but that is not what this work is about. To tell a story, you have to enter the group’s personal space and gain some understanding of what is happening.

Blackpool, once a diversion from the industrial heartlands, is a bit like Las Vegas with a Victorian twist. The promenade offers up a grotesque, carny seediness: a whole Golden Mile of pubs and bars for bloated bodies to crawl through, flashing scary, carrot-coloured midriff flesh. The unbridled hedonism is magnified by competition between the groups, expressed through drinking games, fights and sex in the toilets. It is a brutal, punishing variety show, and it is hard not to laugh.

For me, the daytime images are the most shocking and perhaps the least documented. Every weekend, the town becomes a theatre of social darkness. People repeat what they probably do at home most weekends, but with the excuse to drink even more and take smartphone pictures to replace their obliterated memories.

Blackpool rarely appears in the Sunday supplements unless the subject is fracking, deprivation or a survey of the least healthy places to live in Britain. At the time, it was reputed to have the highest alcohol-related mortality rate for men in the country and more off-licences per head than any other town in Europe.

I don’t set out to be Hogarth, depicting modern urban mayhem, but in Blackpool the visual satire staggers up the street to meet you. It is a snapshot of our times, a graphic nightmare. Blair’s dream of a civilised, continental-style Britain, gracefully sipping wine, has mutated into the smutty uncle of all seaside towns.

Blackpool still attracts millions of visitors every year, and while some businessmen may be unsettled by the source of that revenue, the night-time economy brings millions of pounds into the town. The stag and hen parties will remain welcome because these celebratory rites of passage create employment and help keep Blackpool afloat.

For the people in these pictures, local politics are far from their thoughts. It is about getting blown out of your mind on Jägerbombs and pints, then eating fish and chips to soak up what has gone before and what is yet to come. Hens may spend the day being pampered in beauty salons, relaxing in mud baths or enjoying hours of massage, but once they reach the boozer, it doesn’t look like it. Lost in their own scrambled thoughts, they pick their noses, wiggle their toes and stare with astonishment at cut and bleeding knees, with no idea how the injuries happened.

The long-abandoned Blairite proposal for a super-casino in Blackpool was meant to regenerate the town’s flagging economy. In reality, it would probably not have attracted suits and Porsches, but coachloads of grannies doing damage to slot machines. Gordon Brown dropped the proposal and, although Blair labelled him a puritan, he may have saved Blackpool from even more crime, prostitution and money laundering while helping to keep the small arcades and local hotels in business.

There is no single solution for this neglected but iconic seaside resort. The police sought a ban on drinking between 3am and 6am to curb violent crime in the town centre, but the licensing committee rejected it, unconvinced that ‘turning off the tap’ would prevent crime and disorder.

As for the punters, the drunkards and the drinking lassies, the Hens, the Stags and the Bunnies, yes, they’re funny. But what is Blackpool to be: hen-night central or historic family seaside resort? It cannot be both. Cheap and cheerful is fine for a day trip or a weekend party, but it does not encourage the one-week holiday.

I’d love to return to Blackpool and find that the council had pushed through some of its solutions, a backlash against the punishing regime the punters put themselves through every weekend. It cannot get much more extreme. Something has to give.

As a playground for the working classes, Blackpool, with its mildly titillating end-of-the-pier fun, has always been oblivious to the snobbery it attracts. It deserves to dust itself down and reclaim some of its former dignity, not stagger into the Irish Sea with an inflatable cock as life support while it struggles to adapt to the way we recklessly spend our leisure time.

Right now... I can’t see an end to the carnage.