ON the tour on Saturday 24 April there was a big group of people from all over the place, near and far, Japan, Switzerland, Preston, Bury, Chorlton and so on. 

Brainy as they come as well, asking interesting questions, getting involved. The young women on the right in the picture above - green cardigan and dark coat open - had come especially to Manchester as Elizabeth Gaskell groupies. 

The pioneering nineteenth century novelist was long associated with Manchester and was one of the first from the 1840s to write about the new class of urban working poor while recording their relations with the new middle classes.

"We're big North and South fans," green cardigan had said, when I'd asked what had brought them to Manchester.

"The North/South divide," I'd said alarmed, "or the Gaskell novel?"

Turned out it was the latter. 

As it happens, in the refurbished Central Library there's a first edition of Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, on display with hand-written notes by Elizabeth Gaskell in the margin. 

After the tour the overjoyed ladies almost charged off there when I told them. I believe they went "woo-hoo". 

Tourism is as diverse as individuals that enjoy it. Paranormal addicts one day, Gaskell groupies the next. 

Has a first edition of Mary Barton been 'woo-hooed' before? 

On the same Saturday I took my second group of Didsbury Diners out, this time on a Haunted Underworld tour. 

This is a social group with several hundred members who use the meetup.com site to get together, plan and join events. 

A lot of people new to the city seem to be using it plus single people and those who generally want to explore the city and cultural, gastromic and other activities. In other words people who don't just want to sit on their arse and trawl through season three of whatever's the latest DVD hit.

Good screamers too. The stories in the dark and the occasional 'incident' made them very jumpy. Thanks to Elaine, on the right in the foreground, for organising the group. 

I think the picture shows a rare photographic ability. I've managed to compose it with a large No Entry sign coming out of the group's heads.   

The first group of Didsbury Diners I met had come on the Uninteresting Objects tour on 12 April - along with lots of other people.

We'd met at John Rylands Library and scooted through St John's Gardens, down past Granada and over the river at Prince's Bridge and along the banks of the Irwell on the Salford side to finish up at the Kings Arms on Bloom Street. 

As we scrambled down a muddy bank I feared for some of the heels involved. They took it in good part.

Again it was a large group, mixed age, male and female, but it was mainly the women from Didsbury Diners who carried on the tour with a drink in the Kings Arms. 

A lively bunch, full of laughter and wit, they skipped off to Knott Bar for food after the pub. I wish they'd told me this at the beginning because the tour finished about three quarters of mile away and I could have varied the route to give them less of walk - especially since the heaven's opened shortly after we'd arrived at the pub.

The lady third down the table on its right side in the picture above, brought something on the tour I'd never encountered before: a chihuahua in a handbag. You can see it - just - on her lap in the picture above.

She hadn't told me this at the start of the tour, so it was a surprise to look down at one point during commentary and see big brown eyes staring at me from an elegant accessory. 

The uninteresting object we'd viewed at the Kings Arms is the country's worst royal coat of arms crammed uncomfortably under a gable too small to accommodate it. Look at the poor lion's face. It's in pain. It nowhere near fits as well as a chihuahua in a bag.

THE other day, in the pub, a weird question was asked.

It was: "Have you ever done unexpected work totally different from your regular job? Surprise stuff."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You know. Doing something that you weren't trained to do but was thrust upon you?" came the explanation.

"Still clueless," I said. "What did you do?"

"Where I used to live there was my regular newsagent and once I went in there and the guy was serving behind the till chatting away when he said he felt faint and rushed into the back room. "Could you take-over for a minute," he shouted. So I thought I've served in a shop before, and said, "All right," very casually, and took over for about half an hour. It was funny seeing people's shock as they came in. Made me laugh especially as I just made up prices on products that weren't marked."

"Was the newsagent all right?"

"He was then. Came back out and offered me a free Mars bar or something and a free paper. He collapsed about a week later and died in the shop," said my friend.

"Dark," I said.

"What about you?" he asked.

"Well, I have no musical skill with an instrument and yet I played on several occasions with the Halle Orchestra in Manchester."

"Really? Excellent. How so?"

"I think I'd done a guided tour for them or their guests and the percussionist, Dave Hext, asked me to play. But..."

"Go on."

"This is a double bluff thing in a way."

"Go on."

"He asked to me play football with them for their football team for a few months, 11-a-side and 5-a-side. They were short of team members as they were touring abroad or something,"

"So you played for the Halle Orchestra?"

"Yeah, when I tell people I played for the Orchestra, people say where did you play, I say centre-forward or wide right."

"Better story, but mine was more heroic. Guiding gets you into funny situations," he said.  

MARKETING Manchester job on Monday for Thomas Cook Belgium. Actually it was a Visit Britain job but let's not split hairs.

Thomas Cook handles the tours from the Low Countries and France (I think) for trips to Premier League matches in England. 

This is the group above settling down to an express lunch at Damsons in MediaCityUK. 

Earlier we'd been on a walking tour of the city including Manchester Town Hall which has conveniently got the name Belgium and the latter's coat of arms on the Great Hall ceiling. 

Then it was the Royal Exchange, Spinningfields and a coffee in the Radisson Edwardian Bluu hotel, aka The Free Trade Hall. 

Away football teams tend to stay in this hotel when in town. The match the group were coming to see was Manchester City v Chelsea and so the latter team were staying over. 

We had a coffee and I discovered that most of the men on the tour wrote for individual papers and wrote about just one team. The man second on the right just writes for Anderlecht for example. 

As we were talking John Terry, the Chelsea captain, and Nemanja Matic came wandering past. It was a bonus for the football writers.

I pretended I'd arranged it all of course. 

Terry was being interviewed; later I'm sure I saw the interview on Sky Sports, fortunately there were no Belgians falling over things in the background trying to take pictures. 

There was general agreement over what the final score would be in the match they were about to see: Manchester City 3, Chelsea 0. Some of the fellas wanted to put a bet on the result. 

Chelsea won 0-1. I hope they didn't bet too much. 

THE Haunted Underworld tour today - 18/01/14 - and the pre-Christmas Town Hall Clock Tower tour stand out from recent guiding experiences. To be fair the Town Hall Clock Tower always stands out - it wouldn't be doing its job otherwise, almost 300ft of height has to count for something.

I had the best screamer yet on the Haunted Underworld tour. 

The lady in the black hat was wonderful - see the picture below. The slightest movement or noise in the dark and she gulped and yelped. She was a bag of nerves. If anything moved or there was a loud noise she hit the high notes at such volume we were all covered in a light drift of ceiling dust by the end.

Screamers is just what ghost tours need. A screamer causes the fear to spread and that becomes infectious and then every member of the group becomes that wonderful word, 'jittery'. Very jittery.

The great thing about the group was their good nature, easy smiles and desire to be entertained. On some ghost tours you can get some spoiling sour sceptics. Not today. 

I much prefer screaming women. 

By the way the lady in the red coat in the picture below was from Hong Kong - she won the prizeless award of furthest distance travelled to Manchester for the tour. I'm not sure whether she'd travelled all that way just for my tour, but we can pretend. 

"When you asked who came from furthest away," said one guest with a smile, "I was going to say Brighton. Glad I didn't now. It's just round the corner in comparison to Hong Kong." 

AND now for the bell.

Before Christmas I'd taken a couple of groups up Manchester Town Hall Clock Tower.

Most impressive of all, certainly most unusual, is standing underneath the hour bell as it tolls the hours. This is a mixture of the therapeutic and the terrifying. 

Someone also suggested the bell delivers an erotic experience but I'm not sure you could go that far. Unless you're a master campanologist. Or get off on being wildly vibrated. They may have a point. 

The hour bell has a name, Great Abel. Good name for a bell - Abel.

The name actually derives from the Town Clerk, Abel Heywood, who presided over the construction of the Town Hall - architect Alfred Waterhouse's masterpiece. The bell could fit four fat men in sleeping bags under its immense span.

On the second tour of the evening the group were in place just before 9pm. 

Then slowly the hammer on one side of Great Abel drew back before flinging itself forward at the huge lump of finely tuned hanging iron.

It clanged nine times of course, from almost touching distance. It was overwhelming, it was pure sound condensed, it was breath-taking, shocking yet uplifting. 

Then the noise amplified by the cunning neo-Gothic soundbox of the Town Hall spire threw itself out across the region. I have heard Manchester Town Hall bell on sharp winter mornings from ten miles away. 

And after the crash and clang came the most magical thing of the whole experience, a reverberation that went on and on and on. A low almost electrical hum, the sound waves of a tuning fork after it had been struck, but very low this time, very bass, vast, otherworldly. 

Space precludes mention of the other powerful elements experienced on the tour - the sweet clock mechanism, the huge clock face, the views from the balcony, the carved slightly sinister angels on the elevated balcony. You can read the story of how Manchester got this particular tower here.

On that second tour as we came down the tower and into the public areas of the Town Hall there was a school awards event taking place.

"What's going on?" asked the late-teen daughter in a family of four.

"It's a Xaverian College awards," I said. 

"Oh dear," said the girl, "of course."

"That's the one you were supposed to be at wasn't it?" said the mother.

"It's the one I could have been at," corrected the daughter.

The father, mother and sister of the girl all looked at each other. But there was no tension in the air. What they all had forgotten was that they'd booked to come up the Clock Tower on the same evening as the awards taking place 150ft below. 

They started laughing and the group joined in, mystified, but amused by the oddness of the exchange they'd witnessed.

As we got further down the stairs and then towards the entrance the girl kept meeting teachers and pupils she'd known. 

One final point. 

Great Abel has words from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ring Out, Wild Bells from In Memoriam cast round its skirt - In Memoriam was an elegy to the premature death of Tennyson's best friend, and also, his sister's fiance, Arthur Henry Hallam. 

The lines read on Great Abel, 'Ring out the false, ring in the true'.

Here's the whole poem. It's superb. 

The religious element you can take or leave because in most part these lines by Tennyson are as life-affirming as that last long, lingering reverb on Great Abel.

RING out, wild bells, to the wild sky, 
The flying clouds, the frosty light:  
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:  
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true. 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.… 

Ring out false pride in place and blood,  
The civic slander and the spite;  
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good. 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;  
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;  
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

The Wikipedia entry on the poem didn't mention the Manchester Town Hall bell link with the poem. So I added it.

A FEW weeks ago I met Valentino Castellani for a tour ahead of a talk in Manchester Town Hall. Castellani is a former Mayor of Turin. 

The Marketing Manchester talk was led by Bruce Katz from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, an American think-tank focussed on the role of cities. It included the City Council Leader, Sir Richard Leese, and Mike Emmerich, chief executive of Greater Manchester's economic think-tank. Yep two think-tankers on one panel.

Castellani's one of those people who through his character and brains are dogged by success. That could sound pejorative, that ‘dogged’, but I mean by it that Castellani seems a man for whom success was inevitable, that he couldn’t help but become ‘something’. His noggin is too full of grey matter. His smile is too personable.

This is his biog. The official one, sent to me ahead of the tour.

‘Valentino graduated in Electronic Engineering in 1963 at the Politecnico di Torino (Turin), where he is now a noted university professor and alumni, and spent a year at MIT where he graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1965. He was the independent mayor of Turin from July 1993 to May 2001, when he led the centre-left coalition and helped to develop the first strategic plan ever completed by a major Italian city. In his role as mayor, Valentino focused on creating an international network for the city by actively building relationships with European cities such as Barcelona, Lyon, Glasgow, Stuttgart, Koln, Bilbao and Stockholm, in order to understand best practice from other urban areas. From 1999 to 2006 Valentino was President of the Turin Organizing Committee for the 2006 Winter Olympics.’

Valentino Castellani has another quality which became apparent on the tour. 

This is a quality that is always present in the successful people I’ve met. He was an enthusiast.

The tour started at 7.45am – which is just about the earliest tour I’ve ever conducted. It finished at 9.15am at the Town Hall.

As we walked Castellani was fascinated by the changes he could see in Manchester over the last few decades, he was also aware of the historical movements such as the Free Trade Movement (he felt "honoured" to have his picture taken under the statue of William Gladstone) and he wanted answers on industrial decline and the economy of Manchester now.

He thought the Civil Justice Centre was simply astonishing.

An aside on this.

In the game of cities, in the battle for prestige, landmark buildings delivered for effect as well as for function, are important. They are a statement of city intent, a symbol of ambition and confidence.

Continuing the aside, I wish sometimes when I read some of the more small-minded ranters on Manchester Confidential they could walk around with me on guided tours with overseas visitors. It might teach them to look beyond their own narrow worlds. These ranters remind me of CS Lewis’s Dufflepuds in the Voyage of The Dawn Treader. Contrary characters who are unable to agree with anything, even things which are manifestly for their own good. The expression, 'cut off their nose to spite their face'  was invented for them.

Anyway back to the theme. Castellani was also deeply interested in Manchester’s politics. 

Given the crazy oscillating nature of Italian politics, its party schisms, breakdowns, its coalitions and scraps, the fact that Manchester has been ruled and run by the Labour Party alone for more than a generation he found bewildering.

He told me how he’d got into politics.

“The centre-left party invited me. I was at the university and they had heard of me; perhaps 1,000 people knew of me in Torino. But the party wanted to make a break from the endless battles and intrigue in the city and they must have thought an engineer and an academic could be more impartial. The corruption and the conflict were making big problems in the city, destroying confidence, resulting in nothing being done.

“So they asked me to stand. I got in at the first election with a majority of just a few people. Then I think I shocked the party. Instead of employing party friends in the city cabinet and key city posts – maybe sometimes as thanks for a favour granted, or maybe because it was thought they could help party leaders personally rather than the city which paid them – I employed the best I could from around the country. So the best person for transport was brought in from outside politics and so on. It worked and I got voted in the second time with a large majority.”

Cronyism is the bane of politics, it stultifies, corrodes. 

It was fascinating to have an influential man from outside Manchester and the UK articulating this. Does cronyism exist in Manchester? Of course it does. Did Castellani eradicate it from Turin life. Of course not. But he became a symbol across Italy of the benefits of good governance.

This is what tours do, they teach the guide about their own city almost as much as they teach others about the city. As I say I wish some of the naysayers and dufflepuds of Manchester could share the experience. A perspective on their own city would do them good. 

As we shook hands at the Town Hall, Castellani said: "If you're ever in Torino, let me show you round my city. Like you I'm very proud of it. We have our problems of course, but if you have a sense of identity it can be so strong, so helpful. Of course you have to be careful the identity doesn't stop you looking outside the city. We are all part of the world."

BUSY day Saturday 5 October. Three tours and the last tour the Chinatown Revealed Tour.

This involved taking thirty-one people curious about what makes Manchester’s Chinatown click on a two hour tour around the streets and in and out of the businesses. 

The tour had been organised with Bonnie Yeung of the Yang Sing Restaurant, the indefatigable daughter of Harry Yeung, the United fanatic who arrived here in the 1970s. It was also part of a deal with Manchester Confidential.

Harry Yeung is one of the city's great characters. 

He told me a great story about his United obsession a couple of months ago. He was looking for a new house recently and stumbled across a very Modernist one in South Manchester. His wife wasn’t keen, but Harry was intrigued. So they went back for a second look. At which point the estate agent revealed that the house had been purpose built by George Best. The house was promptly bought, Harry couldn't help himself. Out came a big briefcase of cash from Harry's car boot.

I asked Harry to repeat this story when he joined us on the roof of the Yang Sing during one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done on a tour. Part of the deal for guests was that we would conclude proceedings with wonderful views of the city. The roof of the Yang Sing is the perfect height for this. The taller city buildings form a manmade terrain with the hills peeping through in the distance. On the Saturday we ascended we got crystal clear atmospherics too, you could see the field walls on the Pennine hills fifteen miles away.

The problem was the access. 

This is via stairs and then up a twelve foot ladder in the attic. The ladder shakes and it’s a bit of a stretch to get over the trapdoor rim. Many of the guests didn’t like heights and some weren’t in condition, to put it diplomatically, for such acrobatics. Still most of them managed the climb and they were rewarded with those tremendous views, and then afterwards with tea and dim sum in the form of a Manchester bee made from cuttlefish, almonds and seaweed. 

What I didn't understand were people coming up the ladder with faces a picture of terror saying, "I really don't like this, I don't like heights." I kept saying, "Well don't do it then." But still they came. I admired that. 

"Sorry I didn't pre-warn you about the ladder," I said to the crowd when they assembled on the roof. "I confess I just forgot about it. Mind you, you have had loads of free food and as a bonus conquered a huge psychological challenge. Talk about value for money." 

I think that's called putting a brave face on it.

On the way down one of the guests said, “Did you do a risk assessment for that?”

“What do you think?” I said.

“Thought not.”

“Oh no, you’re not a health and safety officer are you?” I asked.

“No, I’m a sexually transmitted disease data researcher,” he stated.

“I wish you wouldn’t tell people that,” said his girlfriend.

We met some very gracious people on our tour. 

Kichi at D&K Fresh Seafood was entertaining telling us about her alive and kicking eels, carp, crabs and lobsters. Vanessa at Ho’s Bakery looked like she’d taken a professional speaking course the way she handled the crowd packing out her family’s cake and pastry business. Finally Boss at ICFT was enthusiastic and informative as he described his bubble teas, “They’re like a drink and a meal together. They have an extra wide straw so you can suck up the tapioca in the bottom.”

ICFT by the way means, I Come From Taiwan. 

Maybe we should all open businesses like that, with autobiographical names. Mine would be ICFR, I Come From Rochdale, or ILIM, I Live In Manchester or ITPULWTTF, I Take People Up Ladders Without Telling Them First. 

THE public speaking that flows out of guiding is a mixed joy.

On the one hand you usually stay warm and dry.

On the other if you forget what you're talking about or why, you can't suddenly lead the audience on to another guiding location while you gather your thoughts. (This is a classic guiding ruse that also comes in handy when you have an over-eager guest who's interrupting the flow of the tour. It's a simple distraction technique. Always works.)

Certainly when people are sat eyeballing you from a couple of metres away in some hotel function room or conference chamber it sounds unconvincing if you say: "Right, let's all stand and have a walk down to the lobby and back while I recall that very important point I needed to make and which the organisers paid me handsomely to remember."

There is only one thing that happens should you lose your thread during public speaking. You feel the cold grip of shame - or maybe SHAME - on your neck.

That's probably why public speaking tends to command higher fees than guiding. The opportunity for things going horribly wrong is so much higher.

Still I love doing it. 

You have a limited duration in which to 'perform' and if you get it right people love you. This is largely because there's a genetic fear in normal humans about having to sit through endless minutes of dull public speakers bleating on and on.

I emphasise normal humans. 

There is one guide I know who is such a committee man that he drove away everybody but himself after the third meeting of any organisation. He had a bewildering desire to hear his own voice picking through the bones of every point of order as though it were the Treaty of Versailles. I think during one of his endless forensic examinations of correct kerb heights in the city  - or some such - I actually gnawed away my little finger. And my thumb. And the table. 

Another issue was his voice which was downbeat in the extreme as though he were informing us of a death in the family. Sometimes people don't fit their jobs.

In the picture above I'm doing a public speaking gig. 

Or rather I'm compering an event at Victoria Baths, Henry Price's 1906 gem of a public building in Chorlton-on-Medlock. The event marked ten years since the BBC's Restoration programme granted £3.4m to Victoria Baths. 

This involved Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell unveiling a stained glass window - Aqua - but there were also performances and tributes from numerous others. I introduced these good people and topped and tailed with quotes, observations and drollery. 

There was also a synchronised swimming team Aquabatix. Before announcing these fine ladies I was asked if I could mention they'd swum for Disney, David Walliams and ex-President Gorbachev of Russia, the man who oversaw the dismantling of Communism. 

"Wow," I joshed during the event, "what a trio. Gorbachev, Mickey Mouse and comedian David Walliams all together, round the pool. Would have loved to have seen that." 

"Er, they swam for them at different times, not all together," somebody told me afterwards in a whisper as though passing on a secret. You don't always take everyone with you on your compering journey.

Victoria Baths, by the way, is a symphony of Arts and Crafts tiles, and stained glass. It's gorgeous. Worth a visit, with the delight, not the devil, in the detail. The pictures below show off its joys.

Back to the speechifying. 

This was a happy event, a celebration of the work of the Friends of Victoria Baths and the efforts of all the volunteers and other agencies in preserving this exceptional building after its formal closure 20 years ago.  As Henry Owen John of English Heritage said, "Victoria Baths was the most remarkable example of a municipal swimming baths of the period." 

It's easier speaking and compering a celebration, no-one's looking for you to fail, and usually nobody's paid their own money to get in - money always sharpens the focus.

Still there was one disconcerting element.

 The invited guests were separated from me by the full length of a swimming pool, and also in elevation, as they were all sat on the exhibition balcony. So no eyeballing then.

But I thought, as I took the microphone and marched out in front of the audience, if things do go horribly wrong I could at least throw myself into the water. 

Distraction techniques are mighty fine things. And full immersion in a suit would certainly work.

THREE tours to close the week off.

The first was for the excellently appointed Great John Street Hotel. A former city centre school now turned into an elegant hotel for the Manchester-based Eclectic Hotels.

Three women on the tour, two of them writers. The tour was a general Manchester familiarisation walk taking in St John's Gardens, Spinningfields, John Rylands Library, The Royal Exchange, Haunted Underworld for one story, Exchange Square, King Street, Albert Square and back. 

"With all the squares in Manchester the city feels European, Northern European I mean, especially in Albert Square. Antwerp perhaps?" said one lady.

She was right. One of the impulses behind the Town Hall in the 1860s was to reflect Manchester's status as a great trading city. In a way it was saying, 'In the old days there was the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe, but now there's industrial Britain with Manchester at it's heart, so move over.'

Pride comes before a fall they say but you have to admire the bombast of the building. Remember at the time, Manchester, through the Royal Exchange, controlled around 80% of all the world's finished cotton trade. 

When we returned to the Great John Street Hotel we noticed there was a bumper crowd of Coronation Street autograph hunters. In amongst them were several press photographers. The latter were armed with long lenses, no doubt trying to 'pap' actor Micheal Le Vell before his trial. For a journalist group it somehow seemed appropriate. 

In the evening on Friday I took an office group from insurance group Caunce O'Hara on the ghost tour. They proved to be good screamers and the terror was helped by one chap who stood away from the rest of the group in the dark and kept making me jump too by suddenly appearing out of the gloom. On the Saturday tour there were more screams and a very jolly family group discovering the delights of underground Manchester.

I reckon that last tour, was tour 142 of the year.

A MONTH or so ago I took a Swiss film crew from Zurich around the city. Charming pair of gentleman, very interested in the city and also happily keen to use time efficiently and sensibly.

Some TV crews have made a religion of being awkward. They can't decide on the correct shot or take forty seven thousand versions just in case. They are often too afraid, too fastidious or too impractical.

A decade ago I stood on heavily bus populated Portland Street in the city centre with a French film crew when the female producer said to me: "Jonathan, but there are so many buses. Can you phone the Town Hall and ask them to close the road for an hour while we film? I want to do an interview here and the noise is impossible."

The fact that she was from a small French channel, that thousands of people might be inconvenienced, that the city hadn't been paid a fee, that the whole notion was utterly absurd, didn't occur to her. The buses were being too loud. This was an extreme case but there can be a certain arrogance about film crews. 

The TUI Suisse boys were the opposite of this. There was one strange incident.

“Is this right?” asked Roland the presenter. 

“Is what right?” I asked.

“These red trousers and the blue shirt,” said Roland continuing with, “I was told by my colleagues that Manchester boys like to wear red trousers and blue shirts. Everybody in Switzerland thinks this is what Manchester boys do.”

I didn't know what to say except, "You look great in them, but I wouldn't say as a general rule, Manchester lads wear red trousers."


During the course of the day we did see one student-looking lad wearing red trousers.

"There, you see," said Roland.

"I think he's Swiss," I said.

WHEN the politically dodgy Filippo Tommaso Marinetti challenged the world with his Futurist manifesto in French paper Le Figaro in 1909 he gave tour guides a right dig. 

As quoted in Will Gomperz's superb book with the longest title, What are you looking at? 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye, he quotes part of the ranting prologue to Marinetti's manifesto. 

'It is from Italy that we hurl at the world this utterly violent, inflammatory manifesto of ours, with which we are founding Futurism, because we wish to free our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides and antiquarians.'

Futurism is all about getting rid of the past you see, melding mankind with machine in an age of speed and steel. 

The violence inherent in Marinetti's credo of mechanised humanity influenced the growth of Fascism with point 9: 'We wish to glorify war - the sole cleanser of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of liberation, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.'

So not just tour guides get it then, but half the human race.

It was a lunatic, childish manifesto all round. 

But if you can separate out the shouty posturing of mad Marinetti in particular then Furturism did occasionally produce superb art such as Boccioni's States of Mind paintings in 1911.