What was your father’s legacy?

I’ll be taking the Pleasure each in a new direction, but his legacy was that he changed the face of the industry totally. He wasn’t just famous for dealing with Blackpool Pleasure Beach, he was famous for dealing with government issues, basically leading the industry on a world scale. Everyone sought his advice and Pleasure Beach is a benchmark for the industry as a whole.

He put the Big One in, no one had done that before when he built it: The tallest fastest rollercoaster at that time, and everyone followed him; building even taller and faster ones. But he was the man that had the guts and the courage to something like that. He was a great guy, full of enthusiasm and life and fun. He saw this industry as a great big adventure, and just adored every single second of it.

How do you balance your role at Stageworks with your newer Pleasure Beach responsibilities? 

I am very lucky because I’ve got Phil McCandlish, who’s very experienced in the theatre world, and Anthony Johns as well. I am still very involved, of course I am, because I am involved with every aspect of the business as you would expect, but I am very lucky to have people that I like looking after my baby. If I didn’t, that would have made my life a lot more difficult.

I have got the right people in the right places and I have now been in my position as managing director long enough to get a team around me that I believe in, that I trust, that I can work with. It’s very difficult when somebody as flamboyant as my father dies, because obviously I can’t be compared to him. For one, I’m a woman – which is great – but still I will do things in a different way. Obviously times have changed, I’ve got a different team around me now and we are going to find a great way forward.

How have you enriched to the park so far? 

I really believe you need to look at the infrastructure and what we’ve got. I think we have to develop a lot of oases of calm within the park, which is not easy to do because it’s not a new park. It’s great that we are an old park and we’ve got all this heritage, but it’s also difficult finding all these areas to put things in. We built the Ice Lounge under the Flying Machine, we put an oyster bar in, and they have been very successful, but we’ve also kept the donuts too.

We’ve managed to keep traditional aspects, and along with new aspects, make it not necessarily a nicer place to be, but a different place to be and give it a more modern feel. People expect different things, and better quality. We can’t let Pleasure Beach go the way Blackpool has gone as a resort. We’ve managed to cope through two World Wars and are going to carry on. I think we’ve got a difficult way ahead of us, but an exciting one.

What direction will you be taking the park in? 

Well, everything has changed so much in the industry of late, there’s so many corporate companies out there now and they are very powerful with their buying power. We are not in the same position, we are a family company still, that is where we are unique, and we do not intend selling out. We are going to continue making a great amusement park and having a fabulous place for people to come here in Blackpool.

We will still lead as best we can in each direction. Our shows here are second to none, and while we are continuing to put new rides and attractions in, I don’t think we will be building rides like the Big One for a while. The park had been open 90 years before my father put that ride in. He was lucky that at the time it was a ride that was affordable, and now when you look at purchasing products such as the Big One you are talking about huge investments of 20 million, 30 million, pounds. To do that when you are a private company is quite difficult.

We are putting in a new thrill ride this year [the suspended coaster Infusion], but I don’t believe we should follow what everyone else is doing, we should lead in doing something different, and I don’t think there is anything that new in the industry at the moment. time being.

To make way for Infusion you removed the log flume. Was that a big sacrifice? 

We are very limited with space here, and have been since about 1960, we’ve only got 42 acres! The flume was in a situation where you could not continue to run it for the next 15 years, so we took the view that we would put something else in there. But we’ve still got a log flume, in Beavercreek, and we’ve got Valhalla. There will also be a water element in Infusion; it’s great to work with water because it’s something everyone likes. There will also be a bit of interaction with the Big One, I think it will be a very spectacular ride.

One of strengths of the Pleasure Beach has always been its unique mix of old and new attractions, some of which can no longer be found at any other park. Do you intend to keep that balance? 

Yes I do. I think it’s very important and I think that’s what makes Pleasure Beach Pleasure Beach. Obviously you have to look at the costs and if the cost of keeping something old outweighs the value of maintaining it, then we have to think carefully about it. The trouble is you end loving these things more than you should do and at the end of the day we are a business and we’ve got to make sure we keep the right things.

Right now we are renovating the Derby Racer. It’s a unique ride the whole family can enjoy and I think it’s valuable to maintain that, whereas if this were run by a big corporate giant, they’d take it out and wouldn’t be bothered about the history of it. I happen to think it’s bloody good carousel, it’s a beautifully designed ride and a lot of people can go on it. If the aesthetics are right and everything else is right we should be keeping it.

What else makes the Pleasure Beach unique? 

What you see here is people – families – walking round the park laughing, interacting and having a lot of fun. Quite often when you walk round some of the parks in America you don’t see that; you see people going on rides, having a nice time in a sunny environment, but because the queue lines are so far away from the rides, you don’t hear the guest’s reactions.

You could literally walk up and down and around the avenues of the Pleasure Beach and people are having fun, genuine fun. You can stand and watch the Ice Blast, the Big One, the Grand National, often at the same time, and still feel everyone else’s enjoyment even if you are not riding it. That’s something that maybe only you get elsewhere when you go to somewhere like Cedar Point.

Is free entry essential to your future success? 

Times have changed so much. We are dong a lot of research into that at the moment. Is it the right thing? There might be a different way forward. Everyone has a very inflated view of how well Pleasure Beach does when they look at the numbers we get, but what they forget is there is no gate price on the park, so everyone believes we are thriving, but not everyone pays! It makes things very difficult for us.

If you go to Disney, not all the group will go on the rides, but they all pay and it’s expensive. All the group enjoys the experience and you don’t hear people moaning that it wasn’t value for money. The trouble is when something is free all the way along and you change that, everybody hates you for doing it.

Some newspaper reports at the time suggested that the token entry fee imposed at [sister park] Pleasureland in Southport was instrumental in its downfall. Did it cause problems? 

No, we actually had very little trouble with it. We’ve since closed the park, but that wasn’t the reason. What it actually did it was make the park a much safer environment. We had less vandalism. Maintenance costs nowadays are so high, and you really shouldn’t have to put up with someone gong around trashing everything because they think it’s fun. That’s not an environment for a family to be in.

So it was so much easier to operate and, really, £2.50? Is that really going to break the bank and make the decision over whether you’re going to go in or not go in? We had a lot of people that used to use the park as a short cut to the beach, and they were most of the people that objected. Even if you came four times a year, it’s not even the price of one wristband is it? I thought that was a curious comment for people to put in the papers.

There were plans at Southport to expand into the vacant zoo site next door. Would this have saved the park? 

No, I don’t think it would have saved Pleasureland. There are a lot of amusement parks in this area, there a lot in the country, and it’s a small country. I think that by closing Pleasureland it gives Blackpool a bigger and better chance. Pleasureland lost money for years. I am very sad that we’ve had to do what we’ve had to do but is it better to keep the centrepiece of the company, where the family’s history and heritage came from, than to keep something smaller and less successful.

Will you remain as a one-park operation from now on? 

No, I think the future may be very different. I think we may be able to diversify into different areas. I don’t think necessarily we’ll develop another amusement park; we might go in a different direction with hotels or other ventures. We’ll have to look at what the industry needs at the time.

Is there life left in the British seaside? 

I think there’s plenty of life left here. I think the seaside resort is great, but I think what we have got to do is keep up with the times and give people more than they expect when they get here.

Blackpool is behind the times at the moment. It has always led the seaside resorts in the UK, but it need to be somewhere else, and I remain very positive that it will. The investment in the promenade at the moment is amazing, and it’s very beautiful. It’s just unfortunate that it takes so long to do these things and nothing can happen overnight.

What direction do you take if Blackpool gets approval for a ‘super casino’ [the UK Government has since awarded the licence to Manchester]? 

It doesn’t hinge on the casino, we will still be here. I hope the decision is in favour of Blackpool winning though, I believe it is the right place to put it. I think we’ll always emphasise the family side of the park, and always have. This has been a place that families have come for generations and I’m not suddenly going to go everyone can ride the rides topless or anything ridiculous like that for the adults.

This is only going to be one casino, it’s not a strip, we’re not taking Las Vegas overnight, but I think what it will do is bring people to a town where they can do other things, including going to an amusement park, and people love to watch new development. And if Blackpool does get it, nothing is going to happen until after 2010, and we have first got to plan for 2007, 2008, 2009…

Do you expect the overall quality of Blackpool as a resort to improve? 

Gosh, one hopes! I am constantly fighting for a better quality resort. We built the Big Blue Hotel in order to get better quality bed stock in Blackpool. I would like to build more hotels, but not at the moment. There are some areas that are good, but to be fair we need more – a lot, lot more – if we are to encourage more people to come back. I think that some guest houses will remain, and they will be very good, very chic, but I think really it is a shame there aren’t more boutique guest houses in Blackpool.

A lot of people are sitting back and waiting for the Pleasure Beach to do something, or for the council to do something, to change their business. We are a provider of good solid family entertainment and we bring people to the town, but we don’t get anything back from anyone else. Hopefully we can encourage people to stay longer in the future when the other things happen.

Blackpool Pleasure Beach reopened for the 2007 season on February 10

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