There is something incredibly sane about walking up Hampstead Hill in a long black ceremonial robe with gold glitter in broad daylight. A smattering of spontaneous applause erupts from casual sidewalk café-dwellers; a girl stops her car mid-traffic to get out and embrace me and my wife Elise (in fire-engine red silk dragon-fabric) for our sartorial overkill.
We run into my favourite actor Derek Jacobi (who appeared last night in Endgame, Channel 4) on his way to dinner, and his graciousness extends to not mentioning my outfit until I do. Indeed, by the time I enter the Roundhouse, that unique performance space, I am quite sure something has gone right with the world. Maybe clothes do make the man and woman. I am about to find out.
The Roundhouse is precisely that — a big empty, roundhouse gasometer of a place, dark and foreboding, with splashes of light representing drinking areas and maypole-dancing kids in a variety of nursery-rhyme outfits, twirling in and out of the shadows. Balcony rises above balcony, brimming with free booze and multicoloured lights. The hall’s lofty ceiling is festooned like a big top in hundreds of multicoloured flags from India, hand-ironed by Diane Logan (wife of Peter Logan, the kinetic sculptor). Thousands of revellers cram every inch of free space for the event of — I would say the year, but it’s actually every three or four years. The singer Bishi rouses the crowd with nu-rave.
Tonight is Alternative Miss World 2009, brainchild of the artist Andrew Logan (brother of Peter). The theme is “the elements” — earth, air, fire, water and the void. I am one of 16 judges. On us are pinned the hopes and dreams of 20 contestants of several genders and shapes, sizes, accents and exhibitionist tendencies. One glimpse backstage reveals an organised chaos of stilts, stilettoes, bumps and grinds.
Andrew Logan, a sculptor, jeweller and glass portraitist, started the Alternative Miss World Contest in 1972 as an inspired way to throw a party, his egalitarian mission to see that everyone felt like a winner. Modelled on the Crufts dog show, it judges the contestants on poise, personality and originality. Once decorated by his best friend, the designer Zandra Rhodes (with whom I went to school 50 years ago), the contest has achieved legendary status and full-to-bursting attendance as a celebration of art, fashion, music and performance. It is open to all, but no one dares to enter without three spectacular self-designed costumes apiece, in hopes of sweeping the daywear, swimwear and eveningwear categories. No simple bikinis here. Costumes are more like parade floats than frocks. One year a man wore another man as a hat.
The judges also include Rhodes, pretty in pink hair, the sculptor Bruce Lacey (see my 1962 TV film Preservation Man about him), the TV star Julian Clary, film actor Tim Curry, Amy Lamé, of BBC Radio, (wearing a crocheted breast on her head), and the alluring performance artist Jonny Woo, in off-the-shoulder black sequins and blonde mop of a wig. (“I forgot to glue a tiny chip to my bare shoulder — the pièce de résistance,” he regrets.) The comedienne Ruby Wax co-hosts with Logan and voices what we, the audience, are thinking: “Excuse me, where is your head in this costume?” and “Tell me again — what are you?”
For the gowns are narratives more than dresses, and swimwear portrays the beach itself more than any single bathing costume. Some of the outfits are all-singing, all-dancing. Some come with back-up casts of three to ten performers. (The act that releases 15 twirling morris dancers is a bit relentless for me.) Some contestants engage in mock battle onstage with whatever contestant follows them, either for dramatic effect or because of accidental tumbles when yards of disobedient fabric and cardboard collide. It’s not easy wearing a mountain where sheep gambol on the slopes, or dressing up as a caravan wherein the hard-hat inhabitant entertains a sex doll. It’s awkward to parade in a replica of Mexico City complete with slums and smog-filled atmosphere.
Contestants have names such as Miss Flotsam, Miss I Killed the Mary Celeste, Miss No Signs of Any Civilisation Whatsoever, Miss Dementia Praecox and Will Be Miss(ed) . . .
The audience is as multivaried as the contestants, and a photographer poses couples on a dais for souvenir shots. Dominating the throng are towering architectural hats of flowers, Marie Antoinette wigs, turkey-feathered headdresses, a giant white plastic coxcomb, a head alight with sparklers. Piers Atkinson, the hat designer, concludes that I might be at a disadvantage with my head at mere sea level and flies in magnificent headgear for me and Elise, which arrives like a deus ex machina to save the night. Mine is a straw fedora topped with a Pinocchio doll, who operates me via strings attached to my fingers. Elise’s fuchsia bonnet comes with Barbie legs aloft in a salad of Barbie hair.
Everyone who competes receives a gift, I’m told. But there is only one Alternative Miss World and to him or her alone goes the coronation, no matter how many supporting players are involved in each act. Logan announces the winner dressed in his own outfit representing the union of opposites: one half a sumptuous robe, the other half enormous boxes; one arm in a midnight blue opera glove, his head divided neatly between skull cap and half of a sapphire-coloured wig.
Miss Hokusai enters as a patient on an operating table — very T. S. Eliot. I’m beginning to feel anesthetised myself. When does more become too much? After four hours, the bouncing yarn dreadlocks and spectacular bobbing pseudopods begin to blur. I’m already leaning visibly in the direction of the gyrating Miss Sahara and her Amazonian curves — until she gives mock-birth on stage to the dark continent.
But just when you think you’ll overdose on one more silver robot, the moment for which we dared not hope erupts: an also-ran emerges and blows away the competition in a surprise tour de force. Petite Miss Fancy Chance, a 4ft10in young Korean lady, is propelled on to the stage at the apex of a 20ft dress whose skirts are as delicate, round and magnificent as a planet. The layers of her petticoats fall away to reveal a cage in which a cyclist pumps away at clockwork gears. A wire descends to lift Miss Chance by her braid alone to the vaulted ceiling, where she performs graceful arabesques in mid-air. Ahhhh. We’re in love.
She reconnects with her enormous sky-blue dress and the votes claim her as undisputed winner. She is seated on a moving crystal throne, awarded the Splendour of the Crown with its spinning cube at the crest, draped in a sculpted ermine robe and given the bird-shaped sceptre and square orb. She wins the undying loyalty of her subjects for the next four years.
Her speech: “If anyone wants to know, being hung by your hair hurts like hell.”
