When we found him, John was full-blown asleep in the armchair of Kieran's Barber Shop, a name we were never going to walk past. He went by Allan in the shop, thanks to a name mix-up with several other Johns decades back, and had just returned from Mallorca with a shiner from walking into a glass door. He'd worked in Staines for 40 years and watched the town change from the tip of his clippers; around 25 years ago, he watched it briefly become famous.
John remembered the hubbub in the market strip when they shot Ali G Indahouse (2002), Sacha Baron Cohen cruising past on a blinged-out mobility scooter. How did the area feel about Ali G? “I don't live in the area.” How did he feel about the character? “I never watched him.” Would he watch his new film? “Probably not.”
He was the fourth person that afternoon to give us the same answer.
Ali G — Baron Cohen's spoof rapper, a Home Counties boy with big-city delusions — was made almost entirely of Staines. He ran with the West Staines Massiv (a name the town's football supporters also claim), lived with his nan on the “Elmsleigh Estate” (there is no such place; the Elmsleigh is a shopping centre), met “me Julie” at the Matthew Arnold School, and took most of his meals at KFC. On Friday, he returns in Ali G: Who Iz I?, Baron Cohen's directing debut, and, with a pregnant Julie in tow, leaves Staines for the US. We had come for the place he left behind.
Staines — sorry, Staines-upon-Thames — has never known what to do with him. In 2002, the Telegraph reported that the council was planning tourism brochures around his haunts; a decade later, it changed the town's name to shake the association, and last month, threw out a petition for his statue. His return has dragged the place back into a pantomime of boycotts and broadsheet columns, all resting on one assumption: that Staines is embarrassed by its most famous son. We spent a day on foot finding out whether it was, and found that the answer depended mostly on who you asked — whether they actually lived there, and how old they were when he first turned up.
The first person we met in Staines, in the Elmsleigh Centre, tried to sell us perfume. We countered by asking her to talk to us instead and got a refusal on every count: no photo; no, she'd never heard of Ali G; no, she wasn't local. We walked on through the centre — a shopping centre like any other — and into the market, where a fabulously mustachioed old Sikh man was also selling perfume, with little enthusiasm. He didn't speak English, looked away entirely, and summoned a younger colleague, who kept his earbuds in and stayed on the phone throughout our conversation. The older man had traded here for 20 years, the colleague said — extraordinary, really, for someone with close to no interest in selling us anything — though he himself had been here a couple of months, wasn't local, and hadn't heard of Ali G. Zero for two.
This is not a paywall!
To read this rest of this article, register for free.