CRAIG BROWN: Anyone fancy a nice game of bash a banker?

By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail

Published: 01:35 GMT, 17 February 2015 | Updated: 01:42 GMT, 17 February 2015

Other English piers have been wrecked or diminished by fire and neglect, but the pier in Southwold, Suffolk, seems to grow jollier with each passing year.

For some time now, its chief attraction for me has been the Under The Pier Show, an arcade of supremely dotty one-off slot-machines, all of them created by an eccentric comic genius called Tim Hunkin.

These days, most computer games and slot-machines revolve around fear or greed, but not so Hunkin’s. When you enter his arcade, the first sound you hear is hoots of laughter. The same could never be said of Grand Theft Auto, or even good old Penny Falls.

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Fun and games: Tim Hunkin has brought his arcade of supremely dotty one-off slot-machines to London, which include the Microbreak and the Whack A Banker

Hunkin’s humour is a beautiful blend of the nostalgic and the outlandish. One of my favourite machines is Mobility Masterclass, in which you attempt to cross a comically busy roundabout using a Zimmer frame.

The Expressive Photobooth resembles a normal passport photobooth, but while you pose there is a sudden gust of air, followed, a few seconds later, by your seat wobbling. 

Then something happens in the roof, so you look up. When your four passport photos finally appear, they are respectively captioned ‘Exhilarated’, ‘Enchanted’ and ‘Distracted’. A final photo, this one of a complete stranger, is called ‘Reincarnated’.

Another favourite is Microbreak. Most of Hunkin’s machines have a whiff of the Fifties about them — he has much in common with Nick ‘Wallace and Gromit’ Park — and this one is no exception.

Microbreak consists of an old-fashioned armchair standing in front of an equally old-fashioned television set. 

You sit down on the armchair and place your coin in the slot.

The TV screen shows the interior of an aeroplane: you are one of the passengers. Suddenly, the jet takes off, and your seat lurches backwards: you are away on your own armchair Microbreak.

The screen takes you through your hectic flight and coach transfers, followed by a scary journey along perilously windy roads, with your armchair twisting and turning around every corner.

Finally, you arrive at your destination. Your luggage is lost. You sit in a miserable hotel dining room, then around a gloomy swimming pool, then on a beach. 

At this point, a lamp on the top of the television lights up, beaming bright rays into your face. You are then whisked back home in reverse, with yet more sudden jolts and twists and turns — and all in the space of three minutes.

It’s a very funny, very English satire on our hectic struggle to relax. ‘I find holidays more stressful than work and often thoroughly depressing,’ Hunkin said recently.

‘I’m not a good traveller and I’m always worried by missing flights, losing my passport, etc. Depressing, because they involve a lot of aimless wandering around, often surrounded by lots of other people doing the same. This makes me feel old and reminds me of death.’

This slight undertow of melancholy, of dreams dashed by reality, places Hunkin firmly in the tradition of English humour. Through his machines, he delights in what makes us miserable, and this is what makes them so magical.

Another machine is called Divorce. It’s a game for two people, featuring models of a man and a woman with angry expressions on their faces, tussling over a family house. 

Each player is in command of a rotating wheel: the faster you turn it, the more you pull the house in your direction.

Before long, alarm bells ring and the house splits in two, leaving a cat hanging from the ceiling and two children stranded in mid-air. 

It is the sort of grim domestic scene favoured by miserabilist film directors, but somehow the ingenuity of the engineering, and the funny little domestic details — the bunk-beds, the Henry vacuum cleaner, the bathroom mirror smeared with the words ‘I HATE YOU’ — make it impossible not to laugh.

Tim Hunkin, founder and engineer at Novelty Automation, a fun arcade complete with weird and wacky machines now opening in London

This week, these marvellous machines arrived in London. A new outpost of Hunkin’s genius, called Novelty Automation, has opened in a backstreet of Holborn.

This is an area which is fast becoming the comedy epicentre of the world: within ten minutes’ walk are the Soane Museum, home to Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress; the Cartoon Museum, at present showing an exhibition of Marc Boxer’s matchless cartoons; and the Museum of Comedy, where you can see Tommy Cooper’s fez, Steptoe And Son’s stuffed bear, The Two Ronnies’ spectacles and Charlie Chaplin’s cane.

I went along to Novelty Automation the minute it opened, happy to see old favourites like Whack A Banker, in which bankers’ heads pop up and you have to bash as many as you can.

And there are also brand new machines, not least the spectacular Money Laundering, which involves scooping up a great pile of cash with a tall crane and transferring it to weighing scales without being spotted by the financial regulators. 

If Ed Balls and George Osborne have a spare moment, perhaps they should pop in together, and see who wins.

Novelty Automation, 1a Princeton St, London WC1.

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