The real Phoenix Club is called St. Gregory's Social Club and it lives in Farnworth, on the outskirts of Bolton, which hitherto was famous for birthing actor Frank Finlay and playwright Jim Cartwright.
I went to the Primary school across the way from the club, so I know my way around and when I was at senior school I managed to put my hand (note that I tactfully say hand in preference to fist) through the glass in the club's old main doors and I still have the scar on my camera hand.

The original St. Gregory's Club and School, which lived to the right of the dilapidated church in the photo, was the scene of May Day parades in my schooldays, when the boys all wore a sky blue tie on an elastic band. The school and the old club buildings made up a lovely stone courtyard, which could and should have been restored into an architectural gem and made the centerpiece of a Farnworth past no longer present. But, like most of the town, it was left to rot and in it's place now lives a more functional school. There may be fewer leaks in the roof, but soul it hasn't and architectural gem it will never be.

Both architecturally and culturally, Farnworth has been decimated by blinkered town planning. Over the last 30 years or so, virtually every piece of architectural heritage in this old cotton town has been leveled and what some areas (and countries) have preserved for tourism and posterity, local councilors here saw fit to demolish, making way for 3 supermarkets within a 100 yard radius... oh, and a hideous concrete shopping arcade (which replaced another tiled gem).
Unlike towns within the Ribble Valley and more salubrious parts of Lancashire, where individual families are powerful enough to challenge those we elect to demolish our local history whilst feathering their own nests, in Farnworth and Bolton we get what we are given, often by politicians and councillors who share the same heritage but who don't have to live in the same streets.

I first saw Peter Kay live at the Frog and Bucket in Manchester, many moons ago, when ex-pupils of Mount Saint Joseph's School noisily lined the balcony and the floor. But telly and text-messaging kills original one-liners in the twinkling of a screen and many of Peter Kay's original jokes have been cleverly reworked on subsequent tours. As a stand-up comic Peter Kay was quite brilliant, borrowing as he did from the people of Bolton and translating this collective wi into humour palatable for a middle-of-the-road audience.
Personally, I always found the scripts of Phoenix Nights lumpy, often thin and immeasurably less funny than dry local realism, and the rich seam of Bolton humour ran out in Max and Paddy's Road to nowhere, which is pretty much where it went.

Peter Kay's recent take on the fame game was well observed and suitably cutting and whilst he would be admired by many tactical media careerists for cleverly having his cake and eating it (by raising his own stock of fame and fortune by ridiculing the celebrity-lust of less skilled media players), there are those closer to home who see him as another member of the celebrity club who paid his fees by galvanising the wit and support of others.

The likable Vernon Kay was like a duck out of media water and a long way from Beaconsfield when he turned up at St. Gregory's Club, to air his Saturday morning Radio One show. But the Showsec Security men guarding the doors, along with three nosey coppers, should've allayed any fears of him getting mugged.
Two of the only Farnworthians without tickets to get through the doors were an enterprising care worker from the old folks home across the way, who wheeled one of the residents over to the Phoenix Club in a chair.
'Can I have my picture taken with you?' she asked Peter Kay.
'No', was the sharp reply, along with a few words to the effect that he knew her game and what she was up to.
Well of course you know her game, smart arse. She's using a bit of initiative to get through the doors of the money-strapped club that she passes every day, on her way to clean up shit for shit wages, in the hope of catching a ray of your blessed celebrity to light up the greyness of her day.
'Who the **** does he think he is?:' asked one of the other girls watching from the gates of theb Care Home.
That's an easy one to answer. He's the guy who used his initiative to fill theatres with friends and eager Bolton people, until the day he was big enough to force himself on the Live 8 proceedings with the subtlety of Fred Dibner's steamroller. And he's the bloke who was less than liked for his 'arrogance' by a number of staff and 'dressers' at the Palace Theatre, when 'starring' in The Producers, and who now has enough nous and clout to use his chirpy wit and Vernon Kay's Radio One show simply to promote his latest money-spinning venture.
With such a wealth of initiative, Peter's not going to let anyone get one over on him... with or without a wheel chair: that was his career-making joke and he's laying full claim to it.

Part of the charm of Phoenix Nights was the way it sentimentally took the p**s out of a Northern Englishness that has all but disappeared from the present, and the cleanliness of its unreality made it more popular with public schoolboys than locals. The last time I was in St. Greg's Club was for the funeral of Arthur Davies. Arthur was 95 when he died and in his wallet the family found a picture of his late wife and his 1958 cup final ticket when he, like thousands of others from Bolton and Manchester, walked to Wembley Stadium because they couldn't afford to get there any other way.
Active until the day he died, Arthur was walking past St. Gregory's Club one day when they were filming Phoenix Nights, and one of the crew asked him if he'd like to earn some money as an extra and appear in the audience.
'No thanks. Not my kind of humour,' was his reply.
Now there's a man of rare principal who would not sully himself for appearance money !

Of course Farnworth reality is light years away from Phoenix Nights and the church (held in the old church hall in the absence of a functional church) has had it's meager collection of altar gold robbed more than once in recent months and what was once a working class bastion is now in the grip of heroin; the tentacles of which reach into every housing estate in Britain. But the magnitude of that tragedy is no joke and would require scripting by a latter-day Shakespeare.
Fortunately, Farnworth is populated by people more durable than the architecture and far more zany, witty, entertaining and enterprising than any Phoenix Nights script. Indeed, they too would need Shakespeare to do them full justice, which definitely rules out the celebrity playground of television as a prospective medium.

The real Phoenix Club is called St. Gregory's Social Club and it lives in Farnworth, on the outskirts of Bolton, which hitherto was famous for birthing actor Frank Finlay and playwright Jim Cartwright.
I went to the Primary school across the way from the club, so I know my way around and when I was at senior school I managed to put my hand (note that I tactfully say hand in preference to fist) through the glass in the club's old main doors and I still have the scar on my camera hand.

The original St. Gregory's Club and School, which lived to the right of the dilapidated church in the photo, was the scene of May Day parades in my schooldays, when the boys all wore a sky blue tie on an elastic band. The school and the old club buildings made up a lovely stone courtyard, which could and should have been restored into an architectural gem and made the centerpiece of a Farnworth past no longer present. But, like most of the town, it was left to rot and in it's place now lives a more functional school. There may be fewer leaks in the roof, but soul it hasn't and architectural gem it will never be.

Both architecturally and culturally, Farnworth has been decimated by blinkered town planning. Over the last 30 years or so, virtually every piece of architectural heritage in this old cotton town has been leveled and what some areas (and countries) have preserved for tourism and posterity, local councilors here saw fit to demolish, making way for 3 supermarkets within a 100 yard radius... oh, and a hideous concrete shopping arcade (which replaced another tiled gem).
Unlike towns within the Ribble Valley and more salubrious parts of Lancashire, where individual families are powerful enough to challenge those we elect to demolish our local history whilst feathering their own nests, in Farnworth and Bolton we get what we are given, often by politicians and councillors who share the same heritage but who don't have to live in the same streets.

I first saw Peter Kay live at the Frog and Bucket in Manchester, many moons ago, when ex-pupils of Mount Saint Joseph's School noisily lined the balcony and the floor. But telly and text-messaging kills original one-liners in the twinkling of a screen and many of Peter Kay's original jokes have been cleverly reworked on subsequent tours. As a stand-up comic Peter Kay was quite brilliant, borrowing as he did from the people of Bolton and translating this collective wi into humour palatable for a middle-of-the-road audience.
Personally, I always found the scripts of Phoenix Nights lumpy, often thin and immeasurably less funny than dry local realism, and the rich seam of Bolton humour ran out in Max and Paddy's Road to nowhere, which is pretty much where it went.

Peter Kay's recent take on the fame game was well observed and suitably cutting and whilst he would be admired by many tactical media careerists for cleverly having his cake and eating it (by raising his own stock of fame and fortune by ridiculing the celebrity-lust of less skilled media players), there are those closer to home who see him as another member of the celebrity club who paid his fees by galvanising the wit and support of others.

The likable Vernon Kay was like a duck out of media water and a long way from Beaconsfield when he turned up at St. Gregory's Club, to air his Saturday morning Radio One show. But the Showsec Security men guarding the doors, along with three nosey coppers, should've allayed any fears of him getting mugged.
Two of the only Farnworthians without tickets to get through the doors were an enterprising care worker from the old folks home across the way, who wheeled one of the residents over to the Phoenix Club in a chair.
'Can I have my picture taken with you?' she asked Peter Kay.
'No', was the sharp reply, along with a few words to the effect that he knew her game and what she was up to.
Well of course you know her game, smart arse. She's using a bit of initiative to get through the doors of the money-strapped club that she passes every day, on her way to clean up shit for shit wages, in the hope of catching a ray of your blessed celebrity to light up the greyness of her day.
'Who the **** does he think he is?:' asked one of the other girls watching from the gates of theb Care Home.
That's an easy one to answer. He's the guy who used his initiative to fill theatres with friends and eager Bolton people, until the day he was big enough to force himself on the Live 8 proceedings with the subtlety of Fred Dibner's steamroller. And he's the bloke who was less than liked for his 'arrogance' by a number of staff and 'dressers' at the Palace Theatre, when 'starring' in The Producers, and who now has enough nous and clout to use his chirpy wit and Vernon Kay's Radio One show simply to promote his latest money-spinning venture.
With such a wealth of initiative, Peter's not going to let anyone get one over on him... with or without a wheel chair: that was his career-making joke and he's laying full claim to it.

Part of the charm of Phoenix Nights was the way it sentimentally took the p**s out of a Northern Englishness that has all but disappeared from the present, and the cleanliness of its unreality made it more popular with public schoolboys than locals. The last time I was in St. Greg's Club was for the funeral of Arthur Davies. Arthur was 95 when he died and in his wallet the family found a picture of his late wife and his 1958 cup final ticket when he, like thousands of others from Bolton and Manchester, walked to Wembley Stadium because they couldn't afford to get there any other way.
Active until the day he died, Arthur was walking past St. Gregory's Club one day when they were filming Phoenix Nights, and one of the crew asked him if he'd like to earn some money as an extra and appear in the audience.
'No thanks. Not my kind of humour,' was his reply.
Now there's a man of rare principal who would not sully himself for appearance money !

Of course Farnworth reality is light years away from Phoenix Nights and the church (held in the old church hall in the absence of a functional church) has had it's meager collection of altar gold robbed more than once in recent months and what was once a working class bastion is now in the grip of heroin; the tentacles of which reach into every housing estate in Britain. But the magnitude of that tragedy is no joke and would require scripting by a latter-day Shakespeare.
Fortunately, Farnworth is populated by people more durable than the architecture and far more zany, witty, entertaining and enterprising than any Phoenix Nights script. Indeed, they too would need Shakespeare to do them full justice, which definitely rules out the celebrity playground of television as a prospective medium.