In Praise Of Naffness

If you are going to build a new gallery and arts centre, where would you put it? On a shortlist of towns in England, you would probably not have Margate at the top of it. Yet this is where the Turner Contemporary has pitched up.

The fact that Joseph Mallord William Turner spent a couple of years at school in Margate has been enough to have the town honoured by his heritage. There is something of the clutching of straw paint brushes when it comes to the connections between ancients of the arts and where they once had a garret or watered for the season. The Turner connection is like the clutching of author's pen that has been dallied with in Puerto Pollensa. Simply because Agatha Christie stayed there and wrote a thrillerette has been enough to suggest the old trout as the "face" of the resort, an idea that mercifully seems to have been forgotten about. More spectacularly spurious has of course been Chopin, despite his short-lived, tubercular vituperation of Valldemossa.

I confess that it is many years since I have been to Margate. But I can remind myself as to what it was like at the time that I did go there. In Paul Theroux's at-times savage "The Kingdom By The Sea", written in the early 1980s, he said of Margate that it "had never been fashionable; it had never even been nice". Like many an English seaside town which has always been either totally or partially naff, Margate was always one of the finer examples.

This is not, however, to seek to defame Margate or naffness as a whole. Quite the opposite.

Naffness comes in different forms. In general, it can be considered as lacking in taste or as unfashionable, uncool or unlovely. Mallorca, for years, cultivated a reputation for naffness. If you wanted a synonym for the touristic naff, then you sought no further than the M-island word: Madge-orca. Yet, it was also always the obverse; it was fashionable, cool and lovely: My-orca.

Nevertheless, the prevailing image was summed up by Madge-orca. At some point, however, it was as if the island suddenly developed a Turner Contemporary and My-orca assumed a position of cool dominance. Yet nothing fundamentally changed. To put the transformation down purely to marketing would be too simple, and the curiosity as to quite how it happened remains, because Mallorca remains an island of contradiction.

While Margate may now acquire for itself a makeover of artiness, it will retain its essential naffness, and there's no reason why it shouldn't or indeed should seek to dispense with it. The reason why it shouldn't is that naffness is engrained into its very being. Its culture, like other English seaside towns, is what gives it its appeal.

Mallorca, despite its own makeover, retains its enclaves of naffness. They are the contradiction with the sophistication and tradition that reside elsewhere. We all know where they are to be found. Alcúdia's Mile, parts of Magalluf, Arenal and elsewhere. They are all museum pieces to an extent, but such a description disguises their enduring vitality, and their naffness is one that is due, in no small part, to an importing of culture, akin to but not the same as that which has long found expression in a seaside town. While Mallorca seeks to proclaim a distant cultural heritage, it also has a more modern one, that of Del Boy import-export, with bars that reverberate with the endless exclamations of "you plonker, Rodney" or with the Schlagermusik of the Biergarten.

And to deny this would be a huge mistake. Calling somewhere naff may sound derogatory, but, and this may come as a surprise, naff is what a lot of people like. The unfashionableness of old-style entertainment, the lack of taste of the karaoke or the pub, the sheer silliness of being on holiday are what you get from some resorts. And this is just how people want them to be.

Mallorca might wish to go further in turning itself into one giant Turner Contemporary and one Turner Contemporary alone, but it shouldn't. The contradiction of the island should remain, and thank goodness for this, for otherwise it would be a case of forgetting what put Madge into Majorca rather than the Mallord into Mallorca.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.