Well... this puts a damper on my childhood... I am currently 40 years old, and for a large duration of my life, I may have been falsely misled by my parents and left under the impression that I had visited the Small England Coastal Town featured in Craig Ferguson's Saving Grace (2000) during a childhood vacation that I can barely remember bits and pieces of. That was one of the few great lame claim to fame movie trivia moments of my life too.
Craig Ferguson's Saving Grace is about Brenda Blethyn living in a Small England Coastal Fishing Town community with her gardener Craig Ferguson, who has a girlfriend on the side that may be pregnant with his child. Brenda Blethyn's husband has just died, leaving her with nothing but Debts and Bills and a very large house to pay for, with its own very large Garden House. And the entire town is afraid to accept her money because of it. Craig Ferguson comes up with the brilliant idea to commandeer her Gardening House to grow a VERY LARGE QUANTITY of Marijuana, and then sell it off to a Drug Dealer in London as one great big sale to fix all of Brenda Blethyn's monetary problems and debts. And the coolest part is all of the Marijuana they grow in the movie is real. The filmmakers got legal authorization from the Local Authorities and had a Security Guard watch over it while they shot the movie. Things come to conflict when their attempted Drug Deal goes south and the Buyers attempt to come after them to steal their entire score without paying them for it.
So basically, back around the time period of June 1997 when I was 14 years old, my middle class parents would sometimes convince their wealthy parents to spring for these nice vacations outside the country, which granted me an educational experience that a lot of children don't get to have. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to my memory in a photographic sense and several of the events from the different trips have gotten mashed up into "One Fantasy Vacation Adventure" that didn't happen literally, it happened in bits and pieces over the years. In the art of storytelling, this mechanism is what is commonly referred to as an "Unreliable Narrator".
During one of our trips, we stayed with Michael Butterworth's Parents in St Ives, which I mistakenly believed to be the town from Saving Grace for many years. All I remember of that stay was that I was jumping up and down on the second floor because I noticed the floor made these loud booming noises and Michael Butterworth's father begged me to stop out of fear that I would fall through the wooden floor, being that it was an old house. According to Debbie, this trip DID NOT take place in 1997 and could not have been the England Vacation that I remember.
So let's start over. Back around the time period of June 1997, we took a flight to London, England. When we arrived we checked into a hotel of sorts that was suspiciously like what Chevy Chase showcased in National Lampoon's European Vacation. There was this long white hall with no numbers on the door, and the bedrooms didn't have restrooms, instead there was one main bathroom and shower in a room at the very end of the hall that all of the rooms were forced to share. And just like the Chevy Chase joke, it was absolutely possible for someone to walk in on you taking a shower or to accidentally return to the wrong bedroom. The purpose of our stay in this room was to ward off the jet lag stemming from the time change. While we were there, I noted that all of the content on their television stations were boring. No Monty Python and No Doctor Who. Just boring BBC News.
Then we somehow made our way to another town. This is where a big blank spot in my memory comes in. How the hell did we travel there? Did we go by bus? Did we take a train? Certainly I have memories of riding a Train during our European Vacations. How we got from Point A to Point B is a mystery but I do know one thing. We didn't just teleport there. Doctor Who didn't just show up in his Tardis to magically give us a lift.
The House that we stayed in during the 1997 trip that I remember was this big empty bed and bath rental place that Hammer Horror films were made of. I remember it being two stories with nice furniture and multiple rooms. And in the backyard, there was a square stone wall with a door in the back that led directly into a cemetery area, which I most definitely explored. To a 14 year old kid who watches Evil Dead movie, that House was fucking huge, and spacious, and empty, and it gave off the psychological feeling of a possible Haunting. It was the nearby cemetery. There was no out of the ordinary poltergeist activity, just the usual bangs and creaks of an old house settling in, although it may have foreshadowed my later years obsession into Parapsychology and the Occult. It would be interesting to find the house and go back there someday, although I don't think that likely to happen as I never travel outside the city limits by myself much less overseas. According to Debbie Brand, this house was NOT from our stay with The Butterworths in St Ives, it was from Longton, which is the closest that we got to Liverpool.
Saving Grace was filmed in Port Isaac in North Cornwall, England. Debbie Brand believes that while we may have booked our bed and board accommodations in Longton, we may have branched out by visiting other nearby towns during the daytime. When she looked up the general area on the map, her conclusion was it could be geographically possible that we may have stumbled into Port Isaac during one of those daytime trips... maybe. This could explain why I remember the cove with the boats resting on the sand from the movie if none of my other memories match up to the landmark stores and locations in Port Isaac during the year of 1997.
Around the town area which I can remember, some of the corner shops were made of stone bricks, as in rocks, not those usual long square red bricks. One of them had a little ice cream freezer with Cornetto Ice Creams. I repeatedly stuck to the flavor of Mint Chocolate Chip. And there was definitely a large coastal cove area where all of the fishing boats would dock when the tide was in. When the tide was out, the boats would just lay there on the sand, and you could literally walk down a bunch of stone steps and walk directly up to them.
I remember that there was No McDonalds and No Burger King. The only main Fast Food Franchise we saw was Wimpy's Hamburgers, which was the UK's answer to Popeye's Fried Chicken. I remember there being Tourist Shops where I bought a Music Cassette Tape for Oldies Music like Vanity Fair's Hitchin' a Ride and Disco Tex and the Sex O'Lettes I Wanna Dance With Choo and the Bay City Rollers Saturday Night. One of these gift shops sold me a Starburst Magazine detailing the release of Luc Besson's The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis on the cover looking at one of the magical orangish sparkly elements rising up into thin air from the final scene in the movie. I remember there being Arcade Areas and you could lose your money putting pound coins into those machines where all of the coins are being pushed to the edge of a drop off. I lost all of my vacation money, and my father Jim Neece gave me a little extra so that I could see the UK Theatrical Release of Luc Besson's The Fifth Element.
I remember the movie theater featured in that town had an Egyptian Tomb design. While I was waiting for the movie to start, the one thing I took note of was that the UK had Truck Commercials playing onscreen before the film years before the practice came to America. Then they played a comedy skit commercial called GIRL TALK. This British News Reporter was onscreen in this Pink Girly environment announcing that this report was "Just For the Ladies" and politely requested that "All Men Leave the Room" for a few minutes. Once she believed they were gone, all of the girly surroundings were removed as a fake set and the Reporter began to go over the details of a Worldwide Military Coup D'Etat where all of the Women on earth would take the Men hostage and launch a new Government where All Women would Reign Supreme. There was a pink title card showcasing Lip Stick with a Warning: "This is NOT Lipstick. These are Hand Grenades." Then suddenly all of the Pink Girly Environment Sets returned as the News Reporter welcomed back all of the Men in the Room. The short ended and Luc Besson's The Fifth Element began.
So our trip ended and we came back to America. And over the next few years we became fans of The Drew Carey Show with Craig Ferguson. Around the time period of the year 2000, my mother heard that Craig Ferguson was releasing his own movie called Saving Grace into theaters and it was shot in a Coastal Town in England that looked exactly like the one that we visited on our trip. And for the next 24 years of my life, I've been living under the delusion that we visited the town from Saving Grace ever since, even writing about it in my Autobiography. Sigh... what can I say... sometimes our Childhood Vacation Memories can be cut together like a Video Mashup and the ignorance of Childhood can be Bliss.
Craig Ferguson's Saving Grace used to be my Jam on DVD. It still holds up in 2021.
for more from Kevin Neece:
https://linktr.ee/DoctorWhat1983
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