Get your bloody clowns off my streets

Civic enter­tain­ment. What’s all that about, then?

By ‘civic enter­tain­ment’, I mean those indi­vidu­als or groups who are gran­ted licences to per­form in your local shop­ping centre on the one day of the week — Sat­urday — when you have a chance to go out and ful­fil some retail ther­apy urges (or more likely just go to the super­mar­ket for unglam­or­ous basics).

Through some mis­for­tune, I have always lived in or near towns and cit­ies where civic enter­tain­ment is the order of the day. Taunton, Yeovil, Strat­ford in east Lon­don, Hull, Hemel Fuck­ing Hemp­stead and now Eal­ing — all of them abso­lutely unable to let mem­bers of the pub­lic dash around unwel­com­ing con­crete shop­ping centres without their senses being assaul­ted by ama­teur, third-rate performers.

Last Sat­urday, passers-by in Eal­ing were ‘enter­tained’ by a man play­ing easy listen­ing clas­sics on a steel drum, accom­pan­ied by vari­ous auto­mated per­cus­sion pat­terns from a cheap Casio key­board. Mid-tempo greats such as Rain­drops Keep Fall­ing On My Head and Tie A Yel­low Rib­bon were unenthu­si­ast­ic­ally tapped out by an eld­erly gen­tle­man who was sit­ting so still that, if his hands hadn’t been mov­ing, he could eas­ily have passed for clin­ic­ally dead. Sur­pris­ingly, the exotic sound of the steel drum failed to lull me into think­ing I was relax­ing on a sun-kissed Carib­bean beach. No, it was still a cold Sat­urday in Octo­ber out­side a west Lon­don branch of Superdrug.

And today, the streets were alive to the sound of born-again Chris­tian rap­pers. Yes, you heard — Chris­tian rap­pers. Most of what they were shout­ing was unin­tel­li­gible, but at one point I may have heard one of this God-fearing rap crew free­styl­ing: “Yo, Jeee-sussss! He da man! Get down with JC — he da num­ber one dude in da hood, y’all!” Or some­thing. Sadly, these words didn’t inspire any sort of spir­itual awaken­ing in me, but per­haps that’s because it was the road to Han­well rather than the road to Damascus.

I just can’t under­stand why local coun­cils bother. Nobody ever stops to watch the enter­tain­ers; the most atten­tion they receive is a look of mild bore­dom. Even the kids’ per­formers — invari­ably a rather pathetic-looking clown on stilts, whose whole act seems to involve walk­ing around and laugh­ing loudly — only man­age to engage their young audi­ences for a minute or two: “Look mum, it’s a stu­pid man on stilts. Can we go to Bur­ger King now?”

Just let us shop in peace. Please.