In this Kinks video (link below) for the song “Do It Again” from the late 1980s, there is a “larger than life” spiral slide wrapped around a tower about the height of a lighthouse. Apparently, it is part of an amusement park on the shore somewhere in England. This must be a famous landmark to the British for it appears in many other things related to the world of the art and entertainment. Can someone tell me (a) the name of this tower? (b) the name of the amusement park? and (c) the location of this place, a beach name or closest town name or such?
Note: The tower is found around the 3:23 mark towards the end of the video, but scenes of the amusement park and beach appear throughout the video. Thanks!
Looks an awful lot like Brighton Pier to me. The seaside setting suggested that, and a check on Wikipedia indicated that they do have a helter skelter as part of the pier (photo here).
Just to note that helter skelters are not uncommon in Britain, as the link demonstrates.
And of course there’s a Beatles song about one. I mean, how Charles Manson read anything into this beyond “I go down a big spiral slide”, I’ll never know:
I used to read British comic books when I was a lad, in the 70s and 80s, and they often showed a Fun Fair with a Helter-Skelter and a Coconut Shy, and I had no idea what any of those things were.
I had nobody to ask, nowhere to look things up, so I relied on my own imagination or the hope that some day new context would finally present itself and make everything snap into sense.
For some things it took decades for that to happen. Even watching British TV supplied me with no additional context, as such things rarely, if ever, appeared on them (they would show May Pole Dances though, another weird thing).
Strange, I always thought that funfairs were pretty universal western cultural experiences - you don’t have coconut shy’s at Coney island? They’re just small, often traveling amusement parks / fairgrounds.
There’s a great, open air museum in the English west midlands called the Black Country Museum, where they’ve recreated an old mining town (by moving old buildings here). They’ve added in a Victorian funfair, complete with rickety old wooden helter skelter. Splinters are free.
May Pole Dances are something we did back in school (alongside a funfair, usually), generally around May 1st. We’d have a May King and Queen, country dancing, dog shows, fairground stalls. And the maypole was always a central feature. Quite pagan, if you ask me, it’s a spring festival from way beyond the mists of time.
I’m from New Zealand, and a sheltered obscure rural part at that. Though we occasionally had events with a chair-o-plane powered by a tractor, that was about the extent of it. I didn’t see sideshow games and rides (even a ferris wheel, let alone a roller coaster) until I was about 12 years old, when a big deal circus came to town.
What an interesting and revealing question. The word “funfair” is not used in American English, in my experience. Traveling amusement parks are also not really part of my experience, although I think they do exist to some small extent in the US. I had to look up “coconut shy”; I’ve been to a number of US amusement parks but have never seen a coconut shy nor have I ever heard the expression before. “Helter skelter” is also not used in the US, which partly explains Manson’s misinterpretation of the song.
Straightdope continues to blow my mind. So, wait, you do have amusement parks/fairgrounds, even if they’re static, no?
And, ok, coconut shy may be a rather specific name, but you do have stalls where you throw balls/shoot guns to knock an object off a perch and win a stuffed toy? Tell me it’s so!
The final scene at the end of Grease always looked like a funfair to me.
I think we have all the same things, but with different names. The traveling amusement parks are usually called carnivals in the U.S. An “amusement park” would be a permanent location.
I’ve never heard carnivals referred to as funfairs, although the meaning was clear. But I too had to look up “coconut shy”. We have the same games (usually with weighted milk bottles). I can’t think of a standard name I’ve heard for games like that.
To me, a carnival normally involves some kind of parade.
Our travelling funfairs are often run by Gypsies, which would make sense. Or they accompany a travelling ‘big tent’ circus. They generally turn up at a park on national bank holidays.
We do use “funfair” (or “fun fair”) but, IME, to refer to a specific event – one typically hosted by a school or place of employment. The latter being for employees and close relatives, the former for the community at large.
The service organization I was in during high school volunteered at one of these. The host rented all the carnival games & kiosks and we volunteers worked 'em.
I’ve picked up a lot of this from watching Midsome Murders. It’s explained a lot of things that I’d heard mentioned but never knew what they were. A helter-skelter was the place a killer used in one episode. Oh, and tombola. It’s in the lyrics of one of the songs from Evita. But coconut shy is not a termed used anywhere in the US that I’m aware of.
I would call these type of temporary events “carnivals,” y’know with carnies and geeks like in Nigthmare Alley. As a kid, they always seemed a little disreputable to me. My folks would never take me to one, except for the ones our church put on. Of course, we had Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm and Pacific Ocean Park and so on, so we didn’t need them.
County Fairs, though, would have some of this kind of thing, too.
I think it’s sometimes called a bottle toss, although that term is also used for a game where you throw a ring at a group of milk bottles and try to get the ring to land on one of the bottles.
I’m curious about the word “shy” in “coconut shy”. Apparently it means “throw” but I’ve never heard it in American English. Is it commonly used in Britain outside the phrase “coconut shy”?
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