The Royal Hall in Harrogate has a long and interesting history. Designed by Robert Beale and the great Frank Matcham, it opened on the site of the former Cheltenham Pump Room in 1903 as the Kursaal – a name inspired by the building on which it was based, the Ostend Kursaal in Belgium (a German word, Kursaal means “Cure Hall”), and which it lost after the first world war, when something a little more patriotic was required. Whatever it was called, however, it always drew the crowds. Beneath its painted coffered ceiling – it is now Grade II* listed – Sarah Bernhardt starred in a special flying matinee of Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias. Edward Elgar came to conduct his own work here, and Arthur Conan Doyle to deliver a lecture. Louis Armstrong and the Beatles both played it.
How times change, though. I realise that its glory days may be over. All the same, if you’d told me five years ago – or even two years ago – that tickets for the appearance in Harrogate of a double act comprising a former government spin doctor and a former government minister would sell out, and quickly, I wouldn’t have believed you. Who on earth, I might have asked, wants to spend their hard earned money on two hours of unfiltered chat on such subjects as a recent presidential election in Turkey, what might constitute inappropriate behaviour in the House of Commons, and whether the manager of Burnley FC would make a better prime minister than Keir Starmer? Aren’t we all a bit tired of listening to middle-aged men of a certain ilk drone on and on? Wouldn’t people rather just stay at home and watch Newsnight?
