My home-town of Falkirk often feels like an urban version of The League of Gentlemen, only without the laughs. And thrice the horror.
But Falkirk tries, dammit. After all, it brings us Circus Vegas every year, treating us to the kind of dazzling display of Yankee razzmatazz that only a group of touring Albanians can provide. Actually, I don’t know if the Circus Vegas team are Albanians, but I went last year and heard the ringmaster talk, and it’s fair to say that his accent was ever so slightly to the east of Las Vegas. By about 6000 miles.
Location, location, location is the old maxim and, boy, what a location Circus Vegas had in store for us in 2013. I know what you’re thinking. Did they hold the circus in the grounds of Callendar Park estate? Inside the football stadium? Em… close.
It was in the bingo hall car park.
Didn’t you see the glitzy flyers? Well, cash in my chips, and whisk me off to the Grand Canyon in a red, white and blue jet, Uncle Sam. Yee haw! Call me old fashioned, but the only thing that should be taking place in a bingo hall car park in Falkirk is a fight. Between two old guys called Tam.
Circus Vegas’s ringmaster had the vigorous demeanour of a heavily depressed geography teacher who’d just been through a rough divorce. You could hear the suicidal ideation in every quiver of his dulcet Albanian tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, now that my wife has taken everything, I will… NEVER be able to stop doing this shit! OK, for your amazement, the wonderful human cannonball. Will he survive, ladies and gentlemen? I genuinely…. DON’T care anymore!”
The first act was a guy who stacked a bunch of chairs into a tower, pulled his top off and attempted to climb it. A half-naked man desperately trying to balance on a chair? Show us something we don’t already see in Falkirk on a Saturday night, Circus Vegas. What’s the second act? A guy trying to act sober enough to flag down a taxi?
Not long into proceedings there was an X-Factor-style skit involving Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Donald Duck, wherein the charismatic ringmaster bade the unlicensed characters dance, and then pronounced upon their shittiness. The kids laughed; I doubt Circus Vegas’s Armenian lawyers did. I’m tempted to send a letter to Simon Cowell and Disney’s legal team just for a laugh, so Circus Vegas has to change the name of its skit to something like ‘The Sing Quotient, with Muckey Rat and Ronald Goose’.
Still, they’re smart, those circusoids. The kids in the audience would probably have cheered and laughed if every act was a man maniacally waving a jobby on a stick, but the real trick is to keep the dads, brothers, grandpas and uncles engaged. That’s where the scantily-clad 20-something dancing girls came in. At every point at which I was ready to gouge out my own eyes and plug the gaps in my blood-soaked sockets with popcorn in the hope of an agonising yet comparatively interesting death, out they came: juddering, jiggering and gyrating, kicking their long bare legs in the air, and a-jiggling and a-wiggling their snake-hipped asses off. Across the auditorium, you could actually hear the sound of 300 awkward dad hard-ons tightening into life.
I must say that something peculiar happened to my girlfriend each time the dancers appeared. She did this thing where she flailed her arms about and hit me in the ribs with her elbow. I think it must’ve been an Albanian folk dance or something.
During the interval, parents could pay a few pounds to allow their children to go on a supervised donkey trek around the ring. What a magical sight that would’ve been had the guys in charge not looked like henchmen from the Bulgarian Mafia. Fat, old, scowling: all of the qualities you’d expect to see in top-class children’s entertainers, really. It was a donkey trek with all the frivolity of a funeral procession on a merry-go-round.
Some good snaps for the album, though, eh? “Ah, little Johnny, remember that time at the circus when we entrusted you into the care of a deeply uninterested Bulgarian murderer?”
A large positive though: their clown was awesome. Yes, they had a clown. OK, there’s a chance he might have just been a schizophrenic guy in a wig, but that’s pretty much what a clown is anyway, right? I especially loved the bit where he killed time between acts by throwing popcorn into the air and catching it in his mouth. For ten minutes. I shit you not. Never mind your WWE wrestling, kids, THIS is live entertainment of the highest caliber: an ill man chucking food about as a couple of fat men drag a trampoline into the periphery. Sounds like a Falkirk kid’s birthday party, right?
I miss the days when they used to whip the elephants and kick the lions in the cock to make them angry.