I used to visit the Press Club in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
My father in law and my wife's aunt's father in law (Sid) were members and it was always the haunt of "celebrities". I met Sid for lunch one day and he started playing the fruit machine. As a private members' club it had a no limit accumulator jackpot but to win the jackpot you had to select 50p per go. Sid put a pound in and landed £500 on his first go.
Three weeks later we met up again and he repeated the feat, this time landing £300.
The Golden Garter got a bad reputation amongst Belle Vue staff. One of my sales team had transferred there and decided the way to pad out the poor audience figures was to give freebies to Belle Vue staff for Friday and Saturday nights. A dictat came down from Head Office in London saying any management given freebies MUST attend and, like lambs to the slaughter, we started to go in ones and twos.
Some of the main acts weren't too bad but the support - particularly the comedians - were dire and it rapidly became apparent that BV staff were being placed on tables at the front and the comedians were being fed with "information" to enable them to have a go at the BV staff.
Add to this the absolutely dire food "crap in a basket" and the place soon was known around BV as The Golden Grot.
There were many cheesy clubs around in the 1970s. Most towns around Manchester had at least one and Bolton had more than its share.
Some fairly poor performers made it big as the demand for entertainment was vast with only 3 TV channels pumping out a constantly dire diet of poor mass market bilge (compared to the documentaries and serious drama which were excellent) and every club had its resident Bee Gee take offs , macho medallion men with big hair, hairy chests and tight white trousers with a tan gained and topped up weekly on the sun bed - though they many claimed to have a "pad" in Spain - more like a grotty bed sit in Farnworth!
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