An Ode to Bouncers, the Most Honest Account of Clubbing Ever
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An Ode to Bouncers, the Most Honest Account of Clubbing Ever

The ITV series painted a clubland hardly remembered but never forgotten.

Before I'd stepped foot in a club, before I'd stepped foot in a pub even, I knew that bouncers were blokes you didn't want to mess around with. Big, burly men in bomber jackets from towns like Bradford and Burnley, bouncers were gatekeepers of adulthood, they were the force that upheld the divide between child and adulthood. They were the reason why you couldn't enjoy a burger and coke in your local chain pub after half six at night and they were terrifying. They were terrifying because their coats and gloves and walkie talkies imbued their very being with a sense of malevolence, and with that they carried around with them a level of threat. Bouncers, I knew, even back then, back before I'd faced the ignominy of not being allowed in a club on my birthday while all my friends waltzed in and I spent a night sat on the banks of the Thames in Kingston wondering where it all went so very very wrong, were blokes unlike myself. Bouncers were titans.

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My parents weren't pub people and I don't think either had stepped foot in a club since Spandau Ballet's heydey, so most of my understanding of nightlife came via osmosis. I learned about it the same way I learned about pretty much everything: by sitting in my room, on my own, eating crisps in front of the television late at night. So it came to pass that my worldview of going out was formed pretty much entirely by a sadly nearly forgotten ITV series, Bouncers.

The Bouncers I'm talking about here isn't the slightly more upmarket series also called Bouncers which was broadcast on Channel 4 back in 2013. That Bouncers was fine, perfectly enjoyable stuff to watch with a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale and a plate of pie and chips on a dark Thursday evening, but this Bouncers was something else. ITV's Bouncers was the most honest and accurate account of clubbing ever broadcast on British television. This Bouncers opens with the immortal line, "I've broke more jaws than fuckin' Valentino broke hearts," spoken by this bloke:

What more could you want from a late night telly programme? If it's fighting, possible fucking, and an ungodly amount of potentially flaming sambuccas you're after, Bouncers is your new best friend. Bouncers is every proper night out you've ever had. It's every nightclub you've been to when the DJ was a nobody and a spirit and mixer cost less than the mixer. Bouncers is Mercy, Monty's. Bouncers is the club you tell yourself you'll never look back on with anything even resembling fondness and then five years elapse and all you really want from a night out is six bottles of VK, "Get Low" followed by "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and a doner kebab wolfed down in the back of a £40 taxi back to your childhood home. Bouncers is Britain. Britain is Bouncers.

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In a series overflowing with great moments, a perpetual highlight of any episode of Bouncers —and it's a series past consumed on the kind of Sunday afternoon when the only thing keeping you aware of being human is the occasional gulp of Lucozade and the fear that you might shit yourself— is the incredibly high-tech, state of the art, pseudo-CCTV, bullet time profiles each of the titular doormen receive the first time we meet them. Here's Andrew 'Bungy' Lawton, the doorman of the Frontier club in Bately, West Yorkshire, in all his glory.

Not just content with giving us the lowdown on the names of these unsung heroes —names like Steve 'Gibbo' Gibbins, Kev Milne, Ian Quigley, Keith Shaw, names that sing themselves and celebrate themselves— the producers of Bouncers had the good sense to give us all the information we really need. Which is perfectly illustrated below:

The very idea of being On the Doors is central to the programme. It wouldn't exist if bouncers weren't on the doors, let alone On the Doors. These blokes —Bouncers situates itself in what's still a very male dominated line of work— know the ins and outs of being On the Doors because being On the Doors is their life and their life is a life spent On the Doors to the point where they don't see themselves as mere bouncers. They're cultural custodians, bosses of the bacchanalian. They're not just doormen anymore, no. As one of our heroes tells us, "I class myself as an ejection technician, or a crowd control engineer." Who are we to deny him of those titles? He, a man of the Doors, deserves our respect. After all, as Ian Campbell, the show's level headed, no-nonsense star, puts it, "everybody has a stereotypical picture of a doorman in their head who's a meathead, good for nothing else, got tattoos all over the place and is thick as pig shit. That ain't the case now. We've got guys who've got degrees, for God's sake" What does it mean, though, to be On the Doors?

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Working on the doors is the kind of job where you need to be nimble, agile, fast footed — mentally and physically. Think about it: night after night you're dealing with an endless wave of lads and lassess who've stuffed themselves to the gills with drinks that definitely break EU regulations on E numbers who now, sozzled, wrecked, ruined, pissed up, hammered, blottoed, battered, cunted, fucked, steaming, want to drag themselves into your club. The club you proudly do the Doors for. The club that's given you a sense of purpose in life. Your home from home. And you've got these fuckers, these fuckers who fall out of taxis into the queue for your club, hassling you, causing trouble, generally acting the goat. What do you do? If Bouncers is to be believed, you've got to stay calm, stay focued. You've got to have the patience of a saint. Except saints never had to deal with blokes called Sean from Wigan who desperately want a fight and a fag at the same time and will do anything to have both.

"There's the talkers and there's the big macho types. I've always found it easier to talk," says Kev Milne, a bouncer at Club Sanuk in Blackpool who has a bit of a reputation for being a ladies man, a charmer, a schmoozer, a man who possesses the kind of silvery tongue that both sexes fall for. Kev is a talker and On the Doors that can be the difference between an easy night's work and a punch in the face. Kev's colleague, Dave Burnett, agrees. "I think the best doormen in the world," he says, "are definitely talkers, people who can talk people out. They might be the softest guys in the world but they can they can talk people out of a situation and that's the key." Not everything can be talked out when you're On the Doors, though. Sometimes you've got to take matters into your own hands.

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One bouncer not afraid to do that is Bungy. At the end of a particularly tense episode Bungy's involved in an altercation with a deaf clubber who, for reasons even he's probably knocked out of himself, decides to run head first into a plate glass door, outside Mr Smith's in Warrington, like a hearing impaired raging bull. Bungy wrestles the man to the ground with ease, in one, swift, graceful movement, an immaculate flooring if there ever was one. What happens next isn't pretty. "He's grabbed me bollocks," Bungy recalls, "and starts squeezing and turning me bollocks. So I've had to stop him." Bungy does this by punching the bloke very, very hard in the face, off camera. Pandemonium ensues. Bungy's got him in a death grip. The man is nearly unconcious. This is life On the Doors. It's brutal. It's distastefully violent. It's also what happens in clubs up and down the country every weekend of the year. It's a reality.

Still, it's not all bruising and bloodshed down On the Doors. There's a third B, too, arguably the most important of the Bs. And that B is 'banter'. Being a bouncer requires you to have superhuman amounts of banter to deal with the pressures of the job. If you don't have the banter, you're not gonna last a minute on the doors. Sure the jokes might be a bit blue sometimes, but that's the world you're working in. And no, I'm not going to ruin any of them for you. You know why that is? Because I know you want to watch every episode of Bouncers right now. I can't blame you.

Bouncersvisit

is the clubland we pretend doesn't exist when we write about clubbing. It's the clubland that people actually enjoy, actually seek solace in, actually fucking . It's the story of clubbing told by the people who keep clubbing going. It's us. It's all of us. We're all, somehow, someway, the boys On the Doors. I couldn't ask for anything more.

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