Lyall and Rich at SLIMEFEST 2019

3 min read

In partnership with Pleasure Beach

Lyall at SLIMEFEST at Pleasure Beach | Background pic: Nickelodeon UK

I know, I know, I've said several times we'll never do slime - for the sake of our sanity (and carpets)! But, as you might also know if you've seen our Daddy & Dad IGTV channel we recently opened the proverbial floodgate of #slime.

So, we're proverbially stepping up the slime. Introducing... SLIMEFEST!

What's Slimefest?

Assuming I'm talking to my fellow 80s/90s born oldies here, do you remember the Radio One Roadshows back when we were kids? My sister (Aunty Emily) and I went to one on the Plymouth Hoe (oi, naughty - it's a park in Plymouth, UK) in 1989, where we were treated to a Kylie concert, hosted by Simon Mayo among an enormous, screaming crowd of kids and parents. It was SO EXCITING.

Can you imagine something similar, inside a big arena in the UK's best amusement park, Pleasure Beach, with the addition of huge slime cannons covering the crowd in green slime?

Well, once a year, in October half term, excited children and their parents make the pilgrimage to Blackpool Pleasure Beach in Lancashire for the annual Nickelodeon #SLIMEFEST. This year, we joined them to experience the Slimefest for ourselves!

Rich and Lyall in the green room at SLIMEFEST 2019

After a rendezvous in the green room with the acts and presenters, Lyall, Richard and I took our seats in the main arena. Sitting up in the VIP area, we had a fantastic view over the whole arena.

The show

During the two hour show, we were treated to several pop and YouTube celebrity acts which the kids went bonkers for. The audience and most of the acts were absolutely covered in slime. Slime was sprayed out of giant hoses, dropped from huge barrels in the ceiling, sprayed out of pipes along the stage - I mean, slime was coming from everywhere. Fantastic fun!

Musical highlights included Max and Harvey (The X Factor Celebs), Diversity, Roadtrip and finally Raye - one of my absolute favourites this year. The music was great.

Admittedly, being on the wrong side of 35 and a little out of touch with the Hit Parade I did have to Google one of the acts (who turned out to be a super-famous YouTuber) and I also realised I'd asked one of the headliner acts (Jess Folley) where she'd bought her bum-bag earlier on in the green room (explaining why Lyall and Rich looked so embarrassed!).

Kids get slimed, adults are safe!

The layout of the arena is clever. As you can probably imagine, parents generally don't want green slime all over their clothes. Similarly, kids don't want their adults cramping their style and dancing like, well, parents, right near them. The shame!

So, the standing area (the Slimepit) is reserved for kids. The tiered seating around the edge is for the adults. Adult seating is split into coloured zones and each child wears a wristband to match the colour of their adults' zone, labelled with their adults' mobile number.

If the children need a wee, drink or a cuddle etc, the helpful Guides around the arena text or ring the parents who duly pop down to meet their child at a meeting point. Then, at the end, each coloured zone and its children are reunited in the lobby before the main doors are opened.

It works a treat - it provides the kids some freedom to mess about in the slime while the parents sit an watch from the edge. Clever!

SLIMEFEST on telly!

To watch this year's SLIMEFEST, tune in to NICK! channel this Friday 8th Nov at 6pm. Look out for the three of us, waving at the camera!

Disclaimer time! Here at Daddy & Dad we work with our favourite brands and businesses to supplement our content. We like to be 100% transparent and honest with our lovely readers, so we must let you know our tickets to SLIMEFEST were given to us by the lovely PR team at Pleasure Beach, with no expectation of event coverage in return. We had a fantastic time, thank you Pleasure Beach for having us along!