TV review: Save Our Boozer, Blighty (From Blackpool Citizen)

TV review: Save Our Boozer, Blighty

5:32pm Thursday 17th December 2009

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TIMES have changed. Attracting a few meat and potato pie-chomping, real ale quaffing, beer-bellied Henry V111 lookalikes to the back room of your pub on a Thursday night is no longer enough to sustain a boozer.

There’s food and entertainment (and we’re not talking Creedence Clearwater Revival blasting out of the jukebox) to be considered, alongside promotion, marketing and actually running the place in a way that may make you a profit.

Cheap supermarket booze and high brewery rents have not helped, but pubs have, perhaps, not adapted to modern life as quick as other service industries and, as a result, are calling last orders at a shocking rate.

The Raven Inn, in picturesque North Wales, has been closed for three months, but award-winning landlord Jay Smith reckons that, with the help of the locals who will work as volunteers, he can save it.

The pub has served drinkers for 237 years and Jay doesn’t want it to join the list of those being converted into or knocked down for housing. To avoid this fate, though, it will have to bring in around £4,000 a week.

A meeting is called, the villagers are up for it, a team is formed and soon they’re painting, gardening, rewiring and stocking up the bar. IT manager Chris is appointed chairman of the pub committee, and he says: “This is a beautiful village and it deserves to have this pub. Without that, it’s almost a dead village.”

Doug is put in charge of marketing, May will do the administration and former nightclub manager Darren will take charge of the bar.

Soon the pub is ready to open and the locals — though it’s noticeable that none of them have Welsh accents — are excited.

Darren sums it up when he says there are pictures of people standing outside the Raven in 1900 and it would be nice if, in 100 years, there were photographs of today’s locals doing the same.

On the first day, thanks to excitement generated by media publicity, the pub takes £2,926.19. Easy, eh? Well, no. A couple of weeks later and we’re down to just £600 in a week and Jay’s not happy.

Where’s the food? The promotion? The entertainment? The dedication? Doug tells him they all have full-time jobs and the pub is a secondary commitment to most. He’s right, but it’s not going to wash with Jay.

Soon, a fish and chip night is organised, there’s a quiz, entertainment and a regular Sunday roast, which goes down well with a group of bearded bikers who drop in. They even make a commercial to be shown at the local caravan site in an attempt to attract some tourists.

The live band doesn’t go down too well with some of the locals, who “can’t hear themselves think”.

“Give us our pub back,” says one. “You didn’t even have a pub,” Jay reminds him.

Anyway, the changes result in a successful week which brings in £13,000 and, at the end of the month-long trial, everyone accepts the lease offered by Jay and The Raven Inn is saved. Bye bye beardies, hello the future!

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