Clubbercise is a Depressing Sign of the Future of Nightclubs as Novelty

Answer me this: who doesn't love a quick blast of word association? If there's a more thrilling way to begin yet another tinnie-sufused weekend with mates in an overcrowded patch of yellowed grass then I'd love to hear it. What, then, immediately springs to mind when you hear the word nightclub?

Is it squishy bulldog-faced bouncers, interminable queues, five shots for fifteen quid? Or fluff-covered filter tips, weaseling attempts at sliding up to the opposite sex, and sniffer dogs? Maybe it's a grim triptych of desperation, puke, and sullen taxi journeys. Then there's regret, wristbands, and that ever-so-faint possibility of transcendence. All the dirty, noisy, futile stuff that redeems stretching your overdraft to its varicose, bulging limits for a few glimmering hours at the end of each drab week. All that and Dane Bowers DJ sets.

But how many of you honestly thought "exercise and the pursuit of physical fitness?" On what planet other than our own, with our pinched little urban existences of financial penury and the desire for temporary oblivion through low-res hedonism, would that be an acceptable answer? What sort of snivelling wretch would purposefully equate punishing cardiovascular exercise and the inside of a nightclub? Well, we have the answers.

The place is Weston-super-Mare, a seaside town in Somerset more famous for its Grand Pier and genteel daytripper tourism than contributions to innovation in British clubbing. The person responsible is a bloke called Mark Sweeting, owner of Sweet Results Fitness and visionary behind the soon to launch Clubbercise, the maladjusted, toothily grinning child of Zumba fanaticism and the spasming corpse of UK club culture.

Clubbercise exists, in the words if its creator, because "It is so important that exercise is fun (so) I have put together a workout event with a bit of a difference that I hope lots of people are going to love. The soundtrack to the evening will be nineties club classics and chart hits and people will take part in the routine in a darkened club full of disco lights, which will create a real party atmosphere and we want to see lots of people there in their best neon workout gear."

Which sounds perfectly innocent and reasonable, if a bit twee. It's going to take place at Vision nightclub, which is on the Fusion/Beat/Sin/Shed/Euphoria end of the perfectly pitched one word titled provincial club. It sounds like the sort of thing that the groovy art teacher from school would almost certainly enjoy. The one who added you 15 minutes after you finished your last A-level and whose steady stream of Wine O'Clock memes and AbFab cover photos in the intervening years remind you that ageing and its processes are awful and without consolation. It's an acceptably zany idea that your mum would approve of, with no intention of attending. Fun AND exercise, now that's a combination we can all get behind, right?

Wrong, actually. Utterly wrong. Clubbercise is one of the more depressing developments in an already cloud-laden future for nightclubs and their position as the last set of spaces to resist full-scale infantilisation. One reason for that is the sheer cost: £10 a ticket. That's £10 for a ticket to 90's pop bootcamp in the repurposed basement of a nightclub in a seaside town. Naturally, it's not going to be free of charge, but it's a steep fee when you consider what a tenner could translate to in the world of, you know, actual clubbing. There's little to begrudge in the way of a small business making money, and this isn't intended as an evisceration of Sweets Results Fitness, but a charitable interpretation of Clubbercise only stretches only so far.

Sympathy for a ropey concept stretches only until you glimpse the detail of the "reusable' £4 glowsticks" purchasable on the door —presumably straight after you've laid down your crisp £10 note. Imagine being shaken down for contraband glowsticks at a Zumba class. Imagine having to pay £4 for a set of approved pieces of neon-infused plastic. Imagine emptying your change out onto a formica table for the privilege of dressing up like an extra in an Eric Prydz video. It just reeks of a petty opportunism that seems at odds with the carefree proclamations about "making exercise fun." Though you are allowed, charitably enough, to reuse them at future events. Cheers lads!

You might, with ample justification, be wondering exactly why the price of glowsticks at a novelty exercise class in Weston-super-Mare deserves a thousand word rebuttal. The short answer is: it doesn't. Not in itself. What is significant is the space it takes place in. If this was a day-time event, or a fleeting hour slot in a trendy pub it (begrudgingly) almost sort of seems kind of, maybe, possibly palatable and makes a certain kind of wonky pseudo-sense. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that just because exercise exists to me as a horrifying abstraction that it shouldn't be a source of enjoyment to others. It's a question of space, and nightclubs are fundamentally not that space.

In an economy where multi-purpose spaces are increasingly the norm, with pubs moonlighting as creches, choir rehearsal spaces and venues for family (but not wallet) friendly roasts, it was the nightclub—in all of its decaying, unprofitable majesty—that remained the last unassailably adult space. They might be grim underground dungeons of misery, but they were unmistakably mature-ish spaces of misery. Mono-functional and explicit spaces, venues in which to get pissed and rupture life expectancy. Not to reduce body fat percentage.

In the end, it's not just the cheesiness, or the wildly inflated price of neon props, or the price of entry, or even the ugly conflation of fitness and the fundamental purposes of nightclubbing. No, the worst thing about the whole sorry concept is that it offers a reminder of where the future of lies for clubbing in this country: dilution, novelty or niche. And no amount of squatting in time to 90's disco is going to make that any less sad.

Francisco is on Twitter