Journalist turns joker at medieval theme park
"You're meeting King Arthur at noon tomorrow."
It was an unusual telephone call during a surreal few days which ended in two nerve-wracking appearances in front of hundreds of people.
King Arthur is in fact Richard Timson who plays the part of the legendary monarch in the medieval events at the popular Camelot Theme Park near Chorley.
The jousting tournament at the 140-acre attraction is performed twice daily during the summer season.
It is where jesters do funny things and the Knights of the Round Table do battle in a display of real skill and great horsemanship.
A throwaway suggestion was taken a bit too seriously and resulted in a visit for me to the theme park for a meeting with Richard, sorry King Arthur.
It was during my behind-the-scenes tour of the park's facilities that a plan was hatched to unleash me on an unsuspecting crowd on the opening weekend of the new season.
The opportunity to possibly show myself up in public may never have come about if Camelot's immediate future had not been saved by a last-minute takeover last month after it had been placed into receivership.
King Arthur explains: "We have all been looking forward to the 2009 season here at Camelot after a winter of uncertainty – and the forecast of a brilliant summer weather-wise will help us.
"Playing King Arthur is good fun. I started on the dark side – I was the Black Knight for many years – and then I saw the light. I got too old to do the jousting and so I went to be a king."
Mark Leader, operations director at Camelot, says the support from staff, management and the local community has been "absolutely fantastic" during a difficult period for everybody.
Meeting the medieval team, which includes movie stuntmen, and watching them rehearse, was enlightening. These are very pleasant people who often put their bodies on the line to entertain.
And Martin the journalist was to join them as Marvin the jester, with the chief "fool" – Scoop – offering a few tips on how to be funny, something which has never come naturally to me.
"Be as bright as humanly possible and make sure you are cheerful 24/7, which can be a bit of a struggle at times," he tells me.
"Learn a few good jokes and if you have any please send them to me because I haven't got many to be honest. Oh, and don't be shy."
All good advice, no doubt, but how much of it could I take on board when the big wooden gates would open and Scoop and I would bound into the arena to warm up the audience ahead of the tournament itself?
Survival Sunday
First, a slight mishap on the eve of the big day which resulted in a hospital visit to have several stitches for a finger wound sustained on an empty tin of salmon.
Some may have seen it as a masochistic attempt to somehow get out of my Camelot challenge.
No comment on those spurious claims, but Marvin the jester will admit to a substantial lack of sleep the night before his non-eagerly-awaited performance.
Good weather is, clearly, the major factor in determining the size of attendances to a theme park and the morning emerged dry, sunny and warm on Survival Sunday – widely attributed to the Premier League's relegation battle but just as appropriate here.
After all the build-up – and the increasingly-regular panic attacks as the first show approached, it all went by rather quickly and in a blurry kind of way.
Following our warm-up of the audience, I had to rush back to get the king and the others, then stand by his side in the royal box before going into the arena wearing a tin hat to "blow" a trumpet, be hit over the head twice and then be the head of a pantomime horse though the rear would probably have suited me better.
It was that simple, though it seems anything but when you are out there in the midst of it all trying to make it look like you know what you are doing.
Scoop was kind with his appraisal of Marvin afterwards: "He got the crowd going and remembered everything he had to remember. His dancing was fantastic with the trumpet. I think he did very well considering we only had about five minutes of rehearsing."
King Arthur took a more practical approach, telling me: "Well done, but I'm afraid our other jester is coming back so basically you're fired!"
At least, I had survived Camelot and Camelot had survived me. That's surely worth a smile.
Five things you may not have known about Camelot:
* The park used to be a Benedictine monastery before it opened in 1983 as the Magical Kingdom of Camelot
* Legend has it that the River Douglas which runs under the park and hotel was one of the 12 battlegrounds where King Arthur fought the Saxons
* Camelot's most famous ride, Knightmare, is 87ft high and half-a-mile in length
* King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table arrived at Camelot for the first of the jousting tournaments in 1988
* In 1999, grans and grandads battled it out to be the oldest person to ride Camelot's Tower of Terror rollercoaster
You can also read this feature in Wednesday's Lancashire Evening Post
>> Saved theme park reopens
>> Camelot confirms 4.6m tag on eve of opening
>> LEP man appears in sketch with famous comedian
>> Camelot saved in buyout
>> Preparations start for Camelot reopening
>> 360 turn up for 150 Camelot jobs
The park is open until September 6. More details can be found at www.camelotthemepark.co.uk
>> Vote in our latest web poll
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Weather for Preston
Thursday 24 May 2012
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