the golden ticket
Scarborough and the secret to winning at the arcade
I spent the weekend visiting my brother and his wife in Sheffield, and then stopped in York to catch a show at the Theatre Royal before winding up visiting my mate Rob in Scarborough. A trip to Scarbados meant a walk along the beachfront, and strolling the faded glory of the Victorian facade, we inevitably stumbled into the arcade.
On a fair Tuesday afternoon in the Easter holidays, sadly there was no one around. The arcade was noticeably empty, the asinine jangling sound effects of the two penny machines echoing around the place, the flashing of the screens and buttons of one bank of machines reflected in the glass of the ones opposite, all of them waiting to be played.
We took up residence at a game of unexpected complexity for an arcade. To win big on the Ocean Party, you have to fire small glass pearls onto a moving tray to push them onto a central disc. Once you’ve dropped a pearl into all five coloured holes in the disc, a big blue pearl is released onto the lower tray. Once that has fallen off the edge, it’s scooped up into a central lift and dropped through a big spinning wheel.
The trick is to fire the small pearls just as the tray is starting to move forward. Unlike a two penny machine, where you want to fire when the tray is moving out so as to maximise the time for the penny to settle before being pushed forward, here you need the tray to cut off the pearl from rolling all the way to the far side of the machine. If you can time it so that the tray pushes the pearl forward just as it’s rolled to the middle, then it’ll be in line to drop onto the central disc.
I wasted many attempts and only gathered this knowledge by watching Rob. Once I’d got that bit sorted but wasn’t getting any further, I stopped to watch Rob again as one of the bigger pearls on his side fell into the large spinning wheel at the top. He hit the big time: 300 of the small beads came cascading into the machine, each with their own obnoxious sound effect and flash of light. That’s part of the game too; once you’ve hit the top once, the motion of the extra pearls speeds up the process. Rob also pointed out to me that I was one away from the 500 ticket bonus (as I only had one light along the top row to light up) so I ought to aim for the Bonus Light option in the spinning wheel. I told you it was complicated!
At first, it didn’t seem possible to get. But the more we played, the more I edged the beads forward. First the small pearls in the spinning disc, then the big pearl falling off the lower tray. It tumbled up the central lift section and I watched to see if the wheel would spin in my favour. Lo and behold, the blue sphere fell into the perfectly aligned Bonus Light hole and the 500 tickets were mine.
Watching 500 golden tickets spew out of the machine at our feet was hilarious. With all the bleeping and strobing from the machine announcing our winnings, we’d made ourselves very conspicuous to the few characters loitering in the arcade as well as the teenage boys who work there, potently over perfumed with thick aftershave that assaulted us as they came to refill the machine: yes, we won so many tickets the machine needed refilling.
I’m chuffed to say that with the bundles of tickets, I was able to cash in and win this toy otter. He’s so chunky. What a prize.
Rob has been a friend for years. He was formerly my employer and before that, he ran the youth theatre I was a part of. I spent the first few jobs of my career in theatre liberally leeching any piece of direction or advice he had ever given me and passing it off as my own. He really taught me everything I know. Those years at the New Wolsey Studio are some of my fondest memories. The young company was a space where I really found myself, and got a chance to test out who I might want to become in a way that school could never offer, and I’m eternally grateful to have found it and to have been not only championed and taken seriously by Rob, but in equal measure made to lighten up too.
It seems I’ll never stop learning from Rob, even if these days it’s just how to get the golden tickets from an arcade machine.
Scarborough wasn’t empty the whole time I was there this week: it turns out everyone was in Peasholm Park, a mad place with Chinese dragon themed pedalos. But it certainly felt that way on Tuesday, and when it’s not brimming with people, it’s easy to see through the seaside nostalgia and realise how run down much of it is. Like many costal towns, it’s a site of real deprivation, where opportunities and prospects for young people particularly are scarce.
This has been reported on in The Guardian recently in their ongoing series Against The Tide, which seeks to look beyond the statistics and report on what young people who live in these costal towns actually think and feel. The three boys interviewed for the Scarborough edition are Charlie, Jack and Keane, who are all aspiring actors working on a series of plays about their hometown at the Stephen Joseph Theatre with, you guessed it, my friend Rob.
They talk about rehearsing their latest piece, about visiting drama schools and overhearing a posh girl discussing her inheritance on the phone. “And I thought, ‘you won’t hear anyone say that in our town’” Keane says. “It’s not that I’m slagging her off, it’s just something like that feels planets away from where we are. We make money, we don’t wait for money to come to us.”
The article goes on to state plainly that “all three teenagers aspire to be professional actors but all of them know that it is a difficult choice to make work in a place such as Scarborough, which can feel a million miles away from anywhere.” Thank God for the plays they’re making at the SJT then, the first of which can be seen online.
Whilst I was staying with Rob, the boys were interviewed on BBC Radio York. We sat on his sofa and listened to it back, gently cringing when they veered into uncertain territory as teenagers do, us hoping they wouldn’t derail the setup with off piste answers. When the presenter asked them how they would talk about Scarborough to new friends they might meet at drama school, the boys were unclear on whether they’d talk about it in a positive light, which wasn’t quite the angle she was hoping for. But fair enough: what teenager really completely loves where they’re from?
They sent Rob a voice note after the interview, gleeful and giddy. We’ve been on the radio! We’re gonna be famous! It was an honour to share this little window into their world, to see that the huge life lessons I learnt at youth theatre are being learnt all over again by a new set of participants, to whom it’s a different kind of lifeline to what it was for me in Ipswich, but one just as vital. I hope their having the same kind of stupid, wide-eyed fun I had. It certainly sounds like it.
Thanks Rob. For showing us time and again, in the illusory arcade game of life, how to grab the golden ticket.
