I remember once years ago arriving at Waterloo Station to find the place in chaos. A fire up the line at Clapham Junction had disrupted services. For an hour or so hundreds of people stood with incredible patience and implacable calm watching a blank departure board. Occasionally a rumour would rustle through the crowd that a train was about to leave from platform 7, and everyone would traipse off there only to be met at the gate by a new rumour that the train was, in fact, departing from platform 16 or possibly platform 2. Eventually, after visiting most of the station's platforms and sitting on a series of trains that went nowhere, I found myself in the guards' van of an express reputed to be departing for Richmond shortly. The van had one other occupant: a man in a suit sitting on a pile of mailbags. He had an enormous red beard you could have stuffed a mattress with it and the sort of worldweary look of someone who has long since abandoned hope of reaching home. 'Have you been here long?' I asked.

 He exhaled thoughtfully and said: 'Put it this way. I was clean shaven when I got here.' I just love that.

 Not too many months before this, I had been with my family to Euro Disneyland. Technologically, it had been stunning. The amount of money invested by Disney in a single ride would make any part of the Granada Studios Tour look like amateur night in a village hall. But it occurred to me now, as I sat in the immense conviviality of Granada's mock House of Commons debate, that not once at Disneyland had there been a single laugh. Wit, and particularly the dry, ironic, takingthepiss sort of wit, was completely beyond them. (Do you know that there isn't even an equivalent in American speech for 'taking the piss'?) Yet here in Britain it is such a fundamental part of daily life that you scarcely notice it. Just the day before at Skipton I had asked for a single to Manchester with a receipt. When the man in the window passed them to me he said: 'The ticket's free . .. but it's eighteenfifty for the receipt.' If he had done that in America, the customer would have said: 'What? What're ya saying? The ticket's free, but the receipt costs .18.50? What kind of cockamamy setup is this?' If Disney had had a House of Commons debate, it would have been earnest, hokey, frighteningly competitive and over in three minutes. The people on the two sides of the chamber would have cared deeply, if briefly, about coming out on top. Here, things were so contrived that there wasn't the remotest possibility of anyone's winning. It was all about having a good time, and it was done so well, so cheerfully and cleverly, that I could hardly stand it. And I knew with a sinking feeling that I was going to miss this very much.

 The one place you don't find any humour on the Granada Studios Tour is on Coronation Street, but that is because for millions of us it is a nearreligious experience. I have a great fondness for Coronation Street because it was one of the first programmes I watched on British television. I had no idea what was going on, of course. I couldn't understand half of what the characters said or why they were all called Chuck. But I found myself strangely absorbed by it. Where I came from, soap operas were always about rich, ruthless, enormously successful people with $1,500 suits and offices high up in angular skyscrapers, and the main characters were always played by the sort of actors and actresses who, given a choice between being able to act and having really great hair, would always go for the hair. And here was this amazing programme about ordinary people living on an anonymous northern street, talking a language I could barely understand and never doing much of anything. By the time the first adverts came on, I was a helpless devotee.Then I was cruelly forced into working nights on Fleet Street and fell out of the habit. Now I am not even permitted in the room when Coronation Street is on because I spend the whole time saying, 'Where's Ernie Bishop? So who's that then? I thought Deirdre was with Ray Langton? Where's Len? Stan Ogden is dead?' and after a minute I find myself shooed away. But, as I discovered now, you can go years without watching Coronation Street and still enjoy walking along the set because it's so obviously the same street. It's the real set, by the way they close the park on most Mondays so that they can film on it and it feels like a real street. The houses are solid and made of real bricks, though, like everyone else, I was disappointed to peer in the windows and find through gaps in the curtains that they were empty shells with nothing but electrical cables and carpenters' sawhorses inside. I was a bit confused to encounter a hairdresser's salon and a pair of modern houses, and the Kabin, to my clear distress, was much smarter and well ordered than it used to be, but I still felt uncannily on familiar and hallowed turf. Throngs of people walked up and down the street in a kind of reverential hush, identifying front doors and peering through lace curtains. I latched on to a friendly little lady with bluerinsed hair under a transparent rain hat she seemed to have made from a bread wrapper, and she not only informed me who lived in which houses now, but who had lived in which houses way back when, so that I was pretty well brought up to speed. Pretty soon I found myself surrounded by a whole flock of little bluehaired ladies answering my shocked questions ('Deirdre with a toy boy? Never!') and assuring me with solemn nods that it was so. It is a profoundly thrilling experience to walk up and down this famous street you may smirk, but you would feel just the same and you know it and it comes as something of a shock to round the corner at either end and find yourself back in an amusement park.

 I had only intended to stay an hour or so at the park, and hadn't got anywhere near the guided studio tour or the Coronation Street gift shop, when I glanced at my watch and discovered with a snort of alarm that it was nearly one o'clock. In a mild panic, I hastened f$om the park and back to my distant hotel, fearful that I would be charged for another day or, at the very least, that my trousers would be overcooked.

 In consequence I found myself, threequarters of an hour later, standing on the edge of Piccadilly Gardens with a heavy rucksack and a pretty near total uncertainty about where to go next. I had it vaguely in mind to head for the Midlands, since I had given this noble if challenging region of the country pretty short shrift on my previous foragings, but as I was standing there a faded red doubledecker bus announcing WIGAN in its little destination window pulled up beside me and the matter was out of my hands. It happened that at this very moment I had The Road to Wigan Pier sticking out of my back pocket, so unhesitatingly and wisely I took this for a sign.

 I bought a single and found my way to a seat midway along the back upstairs. Wigan can't be more than fifteen or sixteen miles from Manchester, but it took most of the afternoon to get there. We lurched and reeled through endless streets that never seemed to change character or gain any. They were all lined with tiny terrace houses, of which every fourth one seemed to be a hairdresser's, and dotted with garages and brick shopping precincts with an unvarying array of supermarkets, banks, video takeouts, pie and pea shops, and betting establishments. We went through Eccles and Worsley, then through a surprisingly posh bit, and on to Boothstown and Tyldesley and Atherton and Hindley and other such places of which I had never heard. The bus stopped frequently every twenty feet in places, it seemed and at nearly every stop there was a large exchange of people. They nearly all looked poor and worn out and twenty years older than I suspect they actually were. Apart from a sprinkling of old men in flat caps and duncoloured, tightly zippered Marks 8c Spencer's jackets, the passengers were nearly all middleaged women with unlikely hairdos and the loose, phlegmy laughter of hardened smokers, but they were unfailingly friendly and cheerful and seemed happy enough with their lot. They all called each other 'darlin' and 'love'.