Brighton's dog show is the highlight of my year

New Statesman​

04-06-2025

Photo by Simon Dack/Alamy Live News
It is time for the highlight of my year: Bark in the Park, in Queen's Park. In what has become an annual event for us, my friends Ben, Janine, David and Nancy and I bring along a light picnic and a few drinks, and we sit down to watch Brighton's finest dogs, and their owners, compete for rosettes awarded for discipline, talent, self-control and generally being a good boy/girl. Some people and their dogs have been training for it all year. And some of them, one suspects, have not.
The first few rounds are nothing special when compared to the final rounds. This might sound dismissive but, really, the last rounds are something else. I arrive at about one o'clock to watch the doggy triathlon. One of its tests involves jumping through a hoop. Very few dogs manage this smoothly, for the owners have to let go of the lead and this leaves the dogs baffled. I turn up just in time to see a bulldog grab hold of the hoop with its teeth and refuse to let go. Its owners, and a few stewards, chase it around the arena to try to prise the hoop from its jaws. This is what we are here for. The crowd goes wild.
There are about 200 people here, I'd say, sitting around a roped-off area about 30 square metres in each direction. People are of all ages, and there is a Mr Whippy van, a French-crêpe vendor in an antique Citroën and numerous local businesses selling dog merch such as freshly baked dog treats from the Paws Bakery. Just behind us is a bratwurst van and the smells coming from it are driving me crazy, so God alone knows how the dogs are keeping it together.
This is fitting, for one of our favourite rounds is coming up: Temptation Alley. In this, the dogs have to run, or pace, a gauntlet of tempting snacks on either side, and ignore them all, saving themselves up for a much nicer treat at the end. The rate of failure is fairly high, and I do not see how it could be otherwise. But first there is the Golden Oldies round, where dogs over seven years old are walked around the arena and expected to survive. They all do. I don't know who won, but it should have been the white, exhausted-looking dog who may have been a Dachshund once, and who measured the ground in slow, deliberate steps.
'That,' said David, 'is my spirit animal.'
Ben sidles up to me and murmurs in my ear.
'Don't look now,' he says, 'but there's a man behind us who's been saying it's weird to turn up to a dog show without any dogs.' (We do not have dogs, but Ben used to look after a savage Pomeranian called, of course, Simon Le Pom. I do not have the space to tell the stories of his reign of terror.) 'Is it really that weird?' Ben continues. 'I mean, if we'd turned up to a school sports day without any kids, then, yes, that would be weird.'
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Then there is the fancy dress round. This, for reasons I am sure I do not have to explain, is a particularly controversial and hard-fought round. One year a dog was given a lion's mane and it looked magnificent, but did not win first prize. 'Fix!' we shouted. It struck me then that this would be fertile ground on which to run an illegal book. One would have to have more inside knowledge, of course, but I have a year until the next one.
The dogs in their glad rags parade.
'There's a dog there that's dressed as another dog!' cries Ben, outraged.
'It's a panda,' says his wife, the unspoken words 'you berk' hanging in the air.
Three days on, and Ben is still fuming about this. 'It's like they skinned a dog, and then made the other one wear its pelt.' (It didn't really look like that had happened. In fact, it looked rather cute, and definitely like a panda.) In the end it won. A red setter dressed as a belly-dancer came third, even though her dress had slipped off by the end. 'Doesn't have the hips,' says Janine.
But the absolute highlight of the day is the sausage catching. In this, the owners throw their dogs a Morrisons cocktail sausage and their dogs have to catch it in mid air without stepping over the line. This is as much a test of the humans' ability to throw as it is of the dogs' ability to catch. More so, in fact. One feels for the dogs let down by their people, who themselves have had all year to train for this. One dog doesn't even stand up to take his sausage. The crowd goes delirious. But in the end, the prize goes to a chocolate Lab, who had also, amazingly, won Temptation Alley. To both ignore treats and catch them in mid air on the same day is a rare, once-in-a-generation skill set. I think of the great England all-rounders: Botham, Flintoff, Stokes.
Look, this is the best of Britain. It is amateur, hilarious, and as wholesome as a sunny summer's day. I am going to pitch a documentary about this to Channel 4. Think of the Great British Bake-Off, but with dogs. And none of that Crufts business where, as Ben puts it, the judges lift their tails up and look at their arseholes. Publication of this article implies copyright. So don't pinch this idea. It's mine. Along with the illegal side-bets.
[See also: The lost futures of Stereolab]
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