I’ve been in Liverpool this week, filming for Coast on BBC Two. The Queen Mary 2 had moored up at Cunard’s original home en route to Iceland and North America. I have long been sniffy about cruise ships, opining that I couldn’t think of anything worse than being cooped up with a load of old people in bow ties.
But it turns out it’s not quite like that. Yes, the opulence and sheer scale of the ballroom and dining rooms and so on is somewhat preposterous. And the shops – or “retail spaces”, as the ship’s manager insisted on calling them – are absurdly upmarket, like a floating Bond Street. I mean, who drops thousands on a cruise only to drop thousands more on a watch or a handbag?
That said, it is all decidedly unstuffy, and many slices of human life are there to be cherished. I spoke to Marilyn, a retired school librarian from Wirral, whose dad first sailed out of Liverpool as a steward’s boy on merchant ships running the gauntlet in the second world war’s Atlantic convoys. She showed me his little logbook of voyages, including one in 1959 to Canada from Liverpool via Reykjavik, which is exactly where she is heading now.
In a hot tub at the stern, I came across a Bulgarian New Yorker ex-ice hockey player who had fled west in 1960 as a political refugee from Todor Zhivkov’s regime.
And best of all for me was a retired couple from Rowley Regis in the West Midlands, Maureen and Chris. My producer asked if we could film them in their cabin. Chris, a huge, solidly built bloke, had a think about it and, deadpan as a Black Country canal, said: “Would you be filming before, during or after we make love?” I nearly choked on my cucumber sandwich.
A fitting tribute to the Fab Four
Down on Liverpool’s Pier Head there is a statue of the Beatles. Tourists gather respectfully before it, taking pictures of each other turning the fab four into five, eight, 12, whatever. There was something odd about the statue I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first, but then it struck me: the four figures actually look exactly like John, Paul, George and Ringo. Given the controversies over “likenesses” of everyone from Cristiano Ronaldo to Victoria Wood, I’d suggest the bloke who knocked this one up, Andy Edwards, becomes the go-to man for all such tributes henceforth.
• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist, broadcaster and writer
