Be warned Southport, you are next

Mark Steel is bringing his Back In Town tour to Southport’s Atkinson Theatre on Saturday, October 25.

The show, in which he writes a show centred around each town, was in Chorley recently.

He trawls social media for much of his observations, expressing delight at how outraged people in Horwich were by Chorley Council lighting up their Pike.

He also lovedthe fact that one Twitter user compared the Mayor of Chorley to Putin.

And he developed a theory that an astute roundabout salesman must have persuaded Chorley Council to buy 15 roundabouts for the price of 10.

He had a little delving into the local history books and he was happy to inform us that a politician in the 1970s had described Chorley as a “ghastly place”, although he added we should take comfort in the fact that Leyland was “only slightly less ghastly”.

He said: “I’ve stood behind a Londoner on a cliff in Dorset, who said to his wife ‘That lighthouse is getting on my bloody wick’.

“I’ve even read a book called ‘A History of the Railway in Didcot’ that starts ‘This book is in no way a history of the railway in Didcot’.”