The Tower has always been a compass, pointing North with something of the same self-assurance that the arrowed G brought to Granada’s television logo in the years before ITV regions were homogenised. It’s an apt parallel, as, in their day, both Blackpool and the Manchester-based TV channel aspired to lavish the best in the world on their often predominantly working-class audiences. Even today, there’s a heady opulence in the likes of the Tower Ballroom that no amount of vape shop smoke can entirely obscure.

This evening’s variety bill, going under the banner of The People’s Stage, in some ways harks back to the years when the town was the indisputable showbiz capital of the nation, but – importantly – sidesteps the shop-soiled comforts of easy nostalgia. On a day on which the Winter Gardens doubles up as host venue to the finals of the World Matchplay Darts championship, it showcases the breadth of Blackpool‘s present-day appeal; one in which the karaoke raucousness of Ma Kelly sits cheek-by-jowl with the more reflective presence of the quietly over-achieving Grundy Art Gallery, barely an off-licence away.

Organised with the speed and G-force of The Big One rollercoaster on the Pleasure Beach, with a bewildering four-week turnaround between conception and execution, it’s a testament to the town’s ingenuity and spirit, clipped straight out of the celluloid of every film in which teenagers with a youth club to save have declared, ‘let’s put the show on right here!’. In this case, however, it’s not a youth club that’s at stake, but the town’s bid to be the City of Culture 2029.

Taking its cue from the resort’s Showtown museum’s coup in hosting a touring selection from the V&A’s David Bowie archive next year, covers of Bowie’s hits are one of the common threads that stitches the disparate artists performing tonight together. The other thread in the (free) evening’s rich tapestry also runs through it from the foot of the bill to its top: the Hallé orchestra, a setting in which gem stones of every variety can shine at their brightest.

Indeed, there’s a sense in which, with the greatest respect to the high-carat headlining acts, KT Tunstall and Jack Savoretti, the bill comes to seem topsy-turvy. Perhaps it’s their sand-grown passion for the town they grew up in, but homecoming queens Little Boots and Rae Morris are each in the finest of form.

Before the show, Little Boots – Victoria Hesketh to her family – spoke of her pride in her grandfather, a former mayor of Blackpool. Her short set, culminating in a near Bassey-esque performance of Remedy, was imbued with the full wattage of its seasonal Illuminations. Morris’s more subtle enchantments were closer to those of a seafront clairvoyant, though her beguiling Do It – whose ‘Let’s do something that we might regret’ refrain might serve equally as an alternative motto for the town or a slogan for a Kiss Me Quick souvenir hat – was far from ethereal in its rapturous directness.

For me, the surprise package of the night, and also of The Night – the Frankie Valli song he claimed as his own – was Darrell Smith. Sharp of suit and haircut both, he performed his selection of Northern Soul standards with the emotional flair of Gene Pitney, a touch of Vic Reeves’ showmanship, and all the devoutness of the faithful. Avoiding Bowie’s own Anthony Newley-indebted mannerisms, he also made a fair fist of Changes.

Nor should it be overlooked that Bowie, in his dalliances with such artistes as Bing Crosby and Lulu, was hardly averse to show business himself. The evening’s grand finale – a full-throated, five-voiced assault on Heroes, performed line by line by Boots, Morris, Smith, Tunstall and Savoretti – would hardly have been out of place at the end of a Saturday night in front of the telly in 1974. More than 50 years on, in a decade in which the algorithm increasingly leads audiences down the narrowest of cul-de-sacs, Blackpool’s great strength is that it continues to be broad in its casting.

The Tower is still a compass, but these days it looks like it’s pointing up. Now that Manchester has successfully imagined itself to the centre of the universe, it feels like it’s high time for Blackpool to do the same. The people’s stage is set for lift off.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: (l-r) Little Boots, Jack Savoretti, Rae Morris, Darrell Smith and KT Tunstall performing Heroes. Credit: Martin Bostock Photography.