Blackpool would be great if it weren’t for its population – the visitor population.

You’ve only got to take a train from Manchester Piccadilly to Blackpool North to get a taste of what lies in store.

Surrounded by a gaggle of young women drinking alcopops at 10 in the morning, I inwardly groaned but outwardly smiled, weakly. They were friendly enough, but they’d only just started getting ‘tanked up’ and you knew their mood could turn as ugly as their tattoos by the time they spilled out onto the beach.

After being subjected to their conversation, dominated by the swear word that still shocks when uttered by a woman, I wandered down the carriage for a reprieve but entered a worse scenario – a group of pasty-faced spotty lads sporting T-shirts emblazoned with inane nicknames drinking their morning constitutional – Stella.

Any woman entering their midst, whether 16 or 60 was given the benefit of their vulgar appraisal, vile language and raucous laughter. Welcome to Blackpool.

Alighting at Blackpool North, I tried to embark on a brisk walk to my destination – the Pleasure Beach.

But you can’t walk fast along the pavements, littered as they are with ambling fat families eating candy floss or chips, or both.

You try to weave past one group and then end up stuck behind another gaggle with a couple of pushchairs and a mobility scooter thrown in to boot.

You could always try walking in the road but that’s a death trap – cars speeding away from town on one side and trams trundling along on the other... and we all know what happened to Rita’s ex Alan Bradley.

Then you’ve got the hen parties and the stag parties – all massed together creating one amorphous blot on the seaside landscape.

It’s a shame since if you can look past the human bulge, Blackpool is a pretty seaside town.

As one who had Skegness foisted upon her as a child, Blackpool is a class apart. And the town has undergone a huge revamp in recent years. You can even stay in your choice of five star B&Bs.

A walk along the south side of the Prom, dotted with striking sculptures, is a revelatory experience.

What a stylish seafront. What a great beach.

And the town’s attractions are getting better and better. You only have to look at the former Louis Tussauds waxworks – which used to get the crowds in just to have a laugh at the ridiculously poor likeness between model and namesake – but now boasting waxworks of Corrie’s Ken and Deirdre that look more life-like than the real Barlows.

And the iconic Tower and the Winter Gardens, bought by Blackpool council in a £40m deal 18 months ago, are being overhauled by Merlin

Entertainment, second only to Disney in the entertainments world.

The Tower complex opens to the public on September 1 and the theme is to frighten us out of our skins with spooks and ghouls.

Such a pity you don’t need to enter the Tower to see scary sights in Blackpool.

Disregarding the facts gives us all a bad name

LYNN Barber is renowned in the print journalism world as being the best interviewer in the business. She has no truck with celebrity and her incisive portraits have reduced A-listers to tears.

But now a court has ruled that a book review she wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 2008 was ‘spiteful’ and awarded £65,000 damages to the author. Mr Justice Tugendhat said the review contained serious factual errors including the fact that Barber denied she had been interviewed by the author when, in fact, she had.

A Telegraph spokesperson said: "We are dismayed by this judgment… and believe it could have adverse implications for freedom of expression."

We should all be keen to uphold freedom of expression but as journalists, we should be equally eager to maintain basic standards of accuracy.

If a journalist gets such a fundamental fact wrong and pillories someone in the process – as Barber did – she does all of us a disservice.

What kind of parent takes a child pole dancing?

CHILDREN as young as seven are having pole dancing classes in Bolton and pictures of them have been posted on Facebook. Their teacher – Jess Leanne Norris – who boasts on her website that she once got three ‘Yeses’ on Britain’s Got Talent but whose act never made it onto our TV screens (wonder why) can’t understand why everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist. She’s never had any complaints… until now.

The idea of pre-pubescent children in skimpy clothing taking part in an activity synonymous with seedy men and seedy clubs is grotesque enough, but then for images of these youngsters to be posted on a social networking site for paedophiles across the globe to leer at is beyond disgusting.

The sexualisation of children, particularly young girls, is endemic in our society, and these classes are just another nail in the coffin of innocence.

The parents who justify sending their young daughters along to contort their bodies around a pole claiming it’s simply gymnastic exercise are kidding themselves and need to consider the impact of heightening a child’s perception of her body and sexuality years before her time.

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