User:WalkingHare/Sandbox : Timothy Taylor's Landlord Bitter

“It keeps it head when all around are losing theirs”

~ Rudyard Kipling

Timothy Taylor’s Landlord Bitter is a multiple award winning classic strong pale ale, brewed in Keighley, Yorkshire. It is most notable for generating mild interest about the popular music performer Madonna amongst Yorkshire folk in 2003.

Background

Due to the lack of brass bands on her records, and her failure to release her version of ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at’, Madonna had a poor following in Yorkshire. The manager of ‘Skipton Sounds’ wrote:

There was one lass who bought a copy of ‘Like A Virgin’ from me in 1986, but she came back with it the next weekend, saying that it upset her cats, so I exchanged it for a copy of Phil Collins’s ‘No Jacket Required’. I think she was from Colne in Lancashire anyway. She certainly hopped off the number 28 bus. We melted the record and turned it into an ashtray for the staff toilet. I guess we must have thrown it out after they brought in the smoking ban.

When conditions were good, occasional airplay of Ms Ciccone’s work on BBC Radio Manchester could be picked up along the county borders. In 1987 the Dewsbury Picturehouse inadvertently showed the first reel of ‘Shanghi Surprise’ before the main feature, thinking that it was an advertisement for the new noodle bar that had opened on the Bradford Road, an incident that increased the official box office returns for the film by 12.5% in the UK. Apart from these isolated episodes, the people of Yorkshire remained blissfully unaware of Madonna’s meteoric rise. This was all to change.

The Revelation

In 2003, after a drinking session with husband Guy Ritchie in a north London boozer, a Sun reporter discovered a partially comatosed Madge slumped across a table in the snug nursing a glass of ale and moaning “I Love You Tim Taylor, I Love You Tim”. Fortunately the reporter was well acquainted with a great range of alcoholic beverages and realised that it was the great Yorkshire ale that she was besotted with. The headlines spread around the world: Madonna thinks that Yorkshire’s Tim Taylor’s is the best!

The Reaction

The news of Madonna’s love affair with the prize-winning brew caused a ripple of interest amongst the folk of Yorkshire.

The Archbishop of York preached:

We are all like Madonna, seeking the undying love of something greater than ourselves, something that will raise our spirits above the cares of the everyday world. Jesus is the glass that never empties, the glass that is always full of what is pure, and sparkling, and best at room temperature, the glass that never gives us a hangover and never allows us to make a film like ‘The Next Best Thing.

Former Yorkshire and England opening batsman Geoffrey Boycott noted:

My grandmother could drink a pint better than that blindfold with her walking stick. You have to watch the glass all the way from the table to the mouth. If you don’t do that you’re more than likely to spill it into the slips. These drinkers today just do not get the basics right.

Alan Bennet described the moment he heard the news:

Mother, as was her wont at three o’clock, had turned on the light programme as she still called it, unable to come to terms with radios one, two, three and four, and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of tea. My father would say mash a pot of tea, but never in her hearing. Mother said that mash was a word that those who lived on St Barnabas Street would use and she would never have anyone think that she might have connections with all the strange goings-on that happened there.

As the tea brewed to its non-conformist moral purity the tones of the newsreader filled the parlour with the doleful events of the world. “Alan”, mother’s voice from the kitchen exclaimed, “He never just said that some lass in London has been drinking beer did he?” I confirmed the troubling news, and tried to reassure mother that it was good Yorkshire beer and that the lass in question was an American, and could not really be expected to know better. “Eeeh Alan”, she replied “I always worry about you down in London with all those queer folk”. A cream cracker slipped from my fingers and slid fitfully down the arm of the chair like a nervous middle aged tobogganist on Chapel Fields after the first snowfall of winter.

Discovering that Geoff Boycott had made a comment, former Yorkshire and England fast bowler Fred Trueman could not help but chip in:

Has thee stopped beating thy girlfriend then Boyc’s? Now as I’ve always said it’s a sideways-on game, and I would like to see Madonna sideways-on when she gets a mouthful

Managing director of the brewery, Charles Dent said:

It is wonderful she is continuing to take such an interest in the British pub and traditional English ales. Doesn't she look good on it!

Outside of Yorkshire

Some non-Yorkshire folk also expressed their opinion. Pete Townsend, the almost forgotten guitar-smashing front man of The Who, now old, not dead, whined:

I’m sure what Madonna is doing is great, but people should remember that we were drinking Tim Taylor’s back in ’64, and doing it a lot better. We invented punk as well. And drum 'n' bass. And I invented the internet before Al Gore.

Yoko Ono interviewed at the top of a step ladder whilst drawing a tiny vagina on the ceiling of the Serpentine Gallery declared:

John always said peace, love and Tim Taylor’s. Then he went off and shagged May Pang. But I forgave him. Not because of the money.