The end of the end of the pier show? Let the show begin: Cromer's Pavilion Theatre (Tony Buckingham) When I meet them in the Pavilion between final rehearsal and opening night, the stars, producer and director of SeaSide Special are admirably on-message. The posters declare that it's "the future of live variety" - and so do they. Rory Holburn, the producer, began his career managing tours for Spike Milligan. "I only lost him twice in eighteen months," he shrugs. He's confident that his team have "brought variety into the twenty-first century." A young comic, Danny Posthill, illustrates his commitment to the contemporary by telling me a gag about Candy Crush. I don't get it, which proves his point perfectly. This is also Dain Cordean's theme: "We've kept tradition at the heart of it," he reflects, "but instead of old-time vaudeville feeling to the music we have songs by Robbie Williams and Pixie Lott. We're reaching to a wider audience now. This is what today's high standards demand. They know they're in a tough industry. The television talent show made variety respectable again, but the medium keeps its discoveries to itself. The ventriloquist Steve Hewlett headlined at Cromer in the summer of 2011, came fourth in this year's Britain's Got Talent, and is now beyond the price-range of his seaside alma mater. The business, however, is bigger and more globalised than it might look from the back row of the Pavilion. The events company that oversees SeaSide Special maintains offices in London and Florida, from which it marshals entertainers into theme parks, zoos, holiday camps, ships. "I went cruising for a bit as a host on a cruise ship, learnt my craft from that," says Danny. One night I'm doing a comedy club, the next night I'm doing a Shearings hotel or I'm flying out to do a Thomson Gold. Perhaps, I suggest, SeaSide Special, rather than being the last end-of-the-pier show, is actually a cruise ship entertainment that has made landfall in Norfolk. "Oh no," breathes Dain Cordean. This is seaside variety. That's different. Variety is in Dain's blood. His father was a stage hypnotist and his mother was a chorine on Sunday night bills assembled in the late 1970s at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal, Stratford East. The name of the dance troupe was Hot Gusset; Bobby Davro and Michael Barrymore were the star comics; young Dain watched the magicians and developed an obsession with disappearing handkerchiefs and bisected ladies. When his parents divorced he was sent to live with his grandmother in Walton-on-the-Naze - but his interest in conjuring was nurtured by a neighbour, Len Blease, a member of the Magic Circle who had taught Tommy Cooper to remove his underpants with a length of rope. Blease died ten years ago: he is the reason why Dain is topping the bill in Cromer. The middle classes love working-class culture, as long as it seems marginal or threatened. They have rediscovered their love of fairgrounds, pantomime, football, Punch and Judy, village fetes and market stalls. Carter's Steam Fair - as exquisite a collection of historical structures as the Hampton Court estate - has become a place of pilgrimage for dads with hipster beards. Circus too, is robust - Norman Barrett and his budgies entertain my children once a year, just as they did when I was their age. And if the marketing people at the Cromer Pavilion are anything to go by, variety is keen to acquire the patronage of the youngish middle-classes. It is randy for gentrification. So far, however, this constituency is staying away - partly, I suspect, because it doesn't measure modernity in terms of Pixie Lott and Candy Crush. Most British families have some history with variety. The most exciting thing that ever happened to my grandfather was a boyhood trip to see the Crazy Gang: he recalled them haring through the auditorium with a pair of shears, snipping off kipper ties. My equivalent memory is of a matinee at the Bridlington Spa on a wet Saturday in 1979. Roger Stephenson's Puppets materialised a torch-singing cat in gold lame, lip-synching to a recording of Great Balls of Fire. At the end of each chorus, its breasts lit up a fiery orange. Cannon and Ball made my mum laugh so much that my sister stuck her fingers in her ears and cried. Lena Zavaroni ended the show with her full-throated assault on Bright Eyes. I remember blinking back the tears, but I'm not sure whether that was down to Lena's soaring soprano or the song's Pavlovian association with myxomatosis-struck cartoon rabbits with bleeding eyes. 'Seaside variety is different': Dain Cordean mixes comedy with magic (Tony Buckingham) Variety was formulated as a hygienic Edwardian alternative to the raucous word of the Victorian music hall. It promised to liberate its audience from embarrassment - from Marie Lloyd's She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas. That propriety didn't last - and at the seaside, where nobody behaved well, the outré and the sensational flourished. In Skegness, the disgraced Rector of Stiffkey was mauled to death by lions during a sketch about Christian martyrdom. In Blackpool, Valerie Arkell-Smith exhibited herself as "the Man-Woman" - and told the story of how, as Colonel Victor Barker, she'd married a nice girl from Brighton. Just a few weeks ago we lost one of the most clear-eyed observers of this landscape: Bill Pertwee, the apoplectic ARP warden from Dad's Army, who began his career in summer season at Gorleston with a solo sketch about a gluttonous schoolboy on a trip to the flicks. The act was a disaster: there were no laughs, he lost money paying for the uniform and the food, and as he left the stage, he sluiced the wings with half-digested popcorn and banana. Pertwee's memoirs document a professional world that, even in its heyday, was extravagantly unglamorous. He toured the seaside resorts with the Fol-de-rols, a famous variety troupe based in Scarborough, and recalled that the company employed two pianists - one to play the piano, the other to check that the men in the audience had done up their flies. He went out with a revue called We're Taking Off Tonight, on which, during the nude tableau, the vindictive pianist announced to the audience, "and by the way, Daphne can be seen during the day serving behind the perfume counter at Boots in the High Street." Three decades later, Paul Theroux published The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), a journey around the coast of Britain. He stayed in Butlins (where he was reminded of Jonestown, where 900 cultists drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid) and then joined a sparse audience at the Cromer Seaside Special, where he watched the cast perform a blackface tribute to Al Jolson. The finale was a tub-thumping version of Ivor Novello's We'll Gather Lilacs. "Seeing the show was like observing England's secret life," he wrote, "its anxiety in the dismal jokes, its sadness in the old songs." The long-serving designer of Seaside Special, Ian Westbrook, was working on the show when Theroux made his visit. But his view is not so jaundiced. His stories of that time are about pleasure and uproar - like the one concerning the xylophonist who, in a frenzied passage of Flight of the Bumblebee, spat his false teeth into the audience. He also knows about the days when the lifeboat was stationed on the pier: as a boat was launched, the whole structure rattled violently. "The ballerinas who were dancing en point went tumbling over like skittles," he reflects. Audiences loved that kind of thing. Making a night of it: the rapt audience on Cromer Pier (Tony Buckingham) Most variety people are historians by instinct. My conversation with the show's two comics, Danny Posthill and Jo Little, produces a rich account of vanished workingmen's clubs of Tyneside and Yorkshire. Danny's best anecdote is about absent-minded compere who wrote the name of an act called "Rio" on his hand, and then announced them as "R10." And on stage, despite the sloganeering, the past is just as present. Dain's act, with those little kabuki flourishes that regulate applause, is following patterns determined long before he was born. When he and Danny perform a drag sketch, they reproduce Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough's Cissy and Ada down to the celebrated gag about the state in which Ada enjoyed her seaside honeymoon. ("Did you go virgo intacta?" "No, bed and breakfast.") Even in his solo spot, Danny's jokes unfold in a Donald McGill environment where men always return home drunk from the pub to find the missus waiting, arms folded. Seaside variety preserves this ghost-world. Ken Dodd's act, which I saw last year in Bournemouth, is as effective a catalogue of lost trades as Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor: the coalman, the milkman, the rag-and-bone-men - and rent-collectors "who wore soft shoes so you couldn't hear them coming." No so much a gag as a historical detail that nobody except a stand-up would think to record. There's a difference though. Ken Dodd describes this world with sympathy. On Cromer Pier, the line is less sure. There were a lot of laughs on Saturday night at the Pavilion. Jo Little told a joke about "Primani" - the designer label you buy at Primark. "Eeee, we were poor," she hooted. "We had to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken to lick other kids" fingers." But the biggest laugh of the night came from Danny Posthill's gag about a faith-healer. It's one of those three-part jokes of the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman variety. The faith-healer gives sight to a blind man and hearing to a deaf man - but the third man goes scuttling off on his crutches before he loses his disability benefit. This was a gag from the contemporary world and the laughter wasn't the generous kind. Suddenly, a song and dance seemed necessary In 1957, Ealing studios made a picture called Barnacle Bill. It's about an English pier scheduled for demolition: the structure is unsound, the paint is peeling, and the only visitors are the Teds who come to slash the theatre seats. A retired naval officer, Alec Guinness, defends the pier from destruction. His detaches it from its moorings and with a Teddy Boy crew, chugs away from the shore and over the water. The pier seems to be a metaphor for Britain, though it's hard to interpret the precise meaning. The act of separation is celebrated, but quite where this pier is going is anyone's guess. Two years later, Ealing was shut down. Let Cromer avoid this fate. Let it believe in something worth believing, and find the song to go with it. I'll gladly stand with them once a year, gazing optimistically into the headwind. "SeaSide Special" is at the Pavilion Theatre every Tuesday to Saturday until Sept 28. To book tickets call 01263 512495 or visit cromer-pier.com/seaside-special