Scousers: we’ll make firm friends in pub loos on nights out and give a warm welcome to a half-banana half-lamb hybrid, a 37-tonne spider and a 50ft giant mechanical girl. Even rival football fans will quite often sit next to each other during local derbies.
We are warm, friendly and funny – and that’s exactly the type of person Cilla Black was. Our Cilla. Black (whose birth surname was actually White), was a true scouser, a perfect representative of the citizens of the city, beamed into millions of homes on a Saturday night.
I grew up in the 90s, when Blind Date was at its peak, and it was reassuring to see someone with a Liverpudlian accent on the telly. Beforehand, the most popular scousers on the box I’d heard about were Harry Enfield’s – drunk and aggressive in tracksuits. I was slightly too young to appreciate Enfield’s sketches (what a shame) but I’ve had them quoted at me everywhere I’ve been since. The one thing most likely to rile a scouser? Telling him to calm down. That and Manchester United.
Of course, there was Brookside, which began in 1982 and ran until the early noughties, but, being a soap, it tended to high drama and burnt-out cars. People not from the north would only watch it as a sort of anthropological tourism.
Black, on the other hand, was like everybody’s nan, or a neighbour – the kind who’d offer refuge after a family argument as well as sweets that had just slightly lost their fizz. It’s no wonder she was embraced across the land.
Liverpool is well known for its musicians, and Black was a talented singer of the type of 60s girl-group songs I adore. Our sports stars are famous worldwide. There are other well-loved scousers in the entertainment industry, from Ken Dodd to John Bishop; but there is no doubt that the city often falls victim to cultural snobbism and mockery – some of it nasty and pernicious.
Things are much better now, with truer representation of scousers on the TV: Leon and June from Gogglebox; Ricky Tomlinson – admittedly acting Mancunian – in the Royle Family; and various amiable contestants on reality television – but Black was the original antidote.
I have been on a different continent with the sand between my toes – similar to the contestants on far-flung dates on Blind Date – and still had non-British people make reference to a “lorra, lorra laughs”. Her lilting 60s twang and humour proved as popular as that of McCartney and Lennon.
Black came from Vauxhall, north Liverpool, and made it in showbiz. Unfortunately, that might still rank as a remarkable achievement. The entertainment world remains overpopulated with southerners and the middle classes, or northerners who have had their accents atrophied by Rada classes and moves to the capital. That Black has been called a “national treasure” is testament to how people from all over took to her scouse charm.
All this, and she knew how to rock a pastel skirt-suit and arch an eyebrow at the perfect angle. What a fantastic advert for the city she was. Here’s to you, chuck.
