To be honest, I don't really know why I should find it surprising that parts of Boston have so much in common with London - after all, the "founding fathers" did originally set out from England all those years ago for Plymouth in New England, and it's probably not too much of a stretch to imagine that they immediately set about making sure everything was exactly as they liked it to be back home. Certainly, all the place names in this area remind me of home. As that great surreal comedian Eddie Izzard once said of a conversation with one of the first settlers to land in America on the Mayflower: "What? You come from Plymouth, and you arrived in Plymouth? What a massive co-incidence!" I expect that, over the next couple of weeks, there will be times when I'll wonder whether I've left the UK at all.

I found Cheers on the corner of an intersection opposite a large park, and was immediately drawn to the place by the sight of two young ladies being helped down from a glass horse-drawn carriage parked on the kerb outside, an image only slightly spoiled by the fact that the driver was talking irately into a car phone as he took the ladies hands and escorted them to the top of the steps (You have to remember that this was 1992 and a car phone was about the size of two house bricks strapped together with a twelve inch mast for an antenna - Ed). From the street, the bar looked exactly the same as it does on TV, which isn't really surprising of course as they presumably just set a camera up opposite and filmed a bunch of stock shots of cars going past to use throughout the series. The pub used as the front of Cheers is actually a member of the Bull and Finch pub chain, but they've done something which I reckon could well be unique - they've actually branded themselves as "Cheers", left all the Cheers signs and other paraphernalia all over the building and have chosen to distance themselves from the name "Bull and Finch" in favour of taking the name of the TV bar which the place is known for. This, of course, is a very shrewd move on the part of the owners - but it's not something I could imagine happens often. It isn't every day that a big television network allows a pub to use its trademarks and other copyrighted material to advertise themselves and then open up a shop on the premises selling goodies with the TV show logo all over them. I would guess that the network must be taking a fairly substantial cut of the profits.

For those of you who watched Cheers avidly, weeping buckets when Coach died and swearing at the screen when Kirstie Wotserface replaced Shelley Long as the love interest, you'll remember that the bar is in the basement and that the entrance is down a flight of steps from the street - handy if you want your actors to come through the door without having to hang a rubbish looking backdrop of downtown Boston behind it. Well, descending the steps was quite a creepy experience after watching Norm, Cliff and all the regulars of Cheers doing it for years, but I was brought sharply back to reality by the unnecessarily large and thug-like bouncer standing outside the door at the bottom, who took one look at me before waving his hand in my direction with the palm upward. This, I believe, was an example of a special kind of sign language used only by bouncers - what I think he was trying to say to me, in his own charming way, was "show me your identification, or my boot is likely to be launching you into orbit in about three seconds." I didn't attempt to engage the man in conversation - frankly, it looked as though he was the sort who might struggle to string together more than two words, and I was fairly sure that one of them would be "off". Instead, I handed him my passport and watched while he wrinkled up his forehead in concentration and tried to decide whether this strange looking document was, in fact, something he could accept.

The reason they have bouncers on pub doors over here is because somebody has clearly worked out that it's easier to stop underage drinkers getting through the door in the first place than it is to expect every bartender to check out each of the hundreds of people he serves every night. As far as I know, none of the states allow anyone under twenty-one to buy alcohol, although Massachusetts is quite happy to let eighteen year olds work as bartenders, which seems quite odd. Some of the laws don't even seem to make much sense to some of the Americans I've asked, many of whom didn't even understand the rules themselves - so all of what I'm about to tell you could well be totally wrong and you shouldn't take it too much to heart. If the Americans can't understand the rules when they live here all the time, then I've certainly got no hope! As far as I can tell, it's not actually an offence for someone underage to drink alcohol, they simply can't buy it. They can, however, possess it anywhere as long as they are accompanied by a person over twenty-one who knows that they have it - although this seems to be at odds with National Law which seems to say the complete opposite. They can also be given alcohol by an over-age parent (and let's face it, if your parents are under 21 then you really do have an underage drinking problem) or by a spouse who is over twenty-one. Things couldn't be more confusing if they just had a law that said "you can't drink unless you can". Some of the rules seem to openly defy any sort of logic. In the UK, for example, a parent is allowed to pour his fourteen year old son or daughter a glass of wine in a restaurant to go with their meal, but they can't go into a shop and buy them a six-pack. This, of course, makes complete sense - the first is simply providing a drink with a meal in a situation which the parent can control, while the second is openly inviting the child to chug down six cans of lager and get drunk. In the US, for no seemingly good reason, the situation is reversed - since a parent is allowed to provide alcohol to their children, they can openly walk into a shop and buy them a six-pack, but they can't give them a glass of wine in a restaurant because alcohol cannot be served to a minor by anyone on licensed premises. To make sure nobody gets in trouble for accidentally selling alcohol to somebody they shouldn't, the rules in Massachusetts insist that anyone who looks under thirty should be asked for ID just in case they are underage but look much older. But Massachusetts certainly doesn't have the strangest laws on alcohol - my favourite law in the US at the moment is from Vermont, where you are apparently prohibited from having more than one glass in front of you at any one time.

Anyway, back to Cheers. At the top of the steps, gold menu boards are displayed on the railings exactly as they are on television, listing all the sumptuous delights in store inside or at Melvilles Restauraunt upstairs - although, of course, because much of this is just for the benefit of fans, I have no idea how much - if any - of the items listed are actually available. Inside, the bar was tiny and nothing like the television show - it was quite strange, actually, to have walked across the street shown very clearly in the opening sequence of every episode, walked down the stairs through which all the regulars are seen entering the bar, and then walked through the door into a small cramped space occupied by six kajillion people squeezed into an average sized room. I hadn't, of course, really been expecting to find a large square bar in the middle around which all the regulars sat as they do on TV, but I also hadn't expected to find myself in a small basement room in which it was quite impossible to move. I wouldn't have thought it rocket science for the owner to have had a bit of a redesign, knock a couple of walls down and at least attempt to make the interior slightly resemble the friendly place we see on Channel 4 every week where everybody knows your name and people can somehow sit at the bar all day long drinking solidly and not fall over when they climb down from their stool. In the TV series, Cheers has a big restaurant upstairs called Melvilles, and regulars can get up to it by climbing a flight of stairs on one side of the bar. Well, you actually can get upstairs via a flight of stairs from the real Cheers, although what you find up there certainly isn't a flashy high-class restaurant. It's a souvenir shop, where they aren't at all worried about having everything you could possibly imagine branded with the Cheers logo. I bought myself a Tee-Shirt, and fought my way out of there as quickly as possible, taking a different subway back to the hotel and walking the final part of the journey through some pleasant cobbled side streets. Back in the room, I turned on the TV and found myself watching the first episode in a new series of - you guessed it - Cheers, an episode which we probably won't see in the UK until next year. At least I can now say that I've been there - although, to be honest, the place really is a bit of a tourist trap. If you can find anybody from the Boston area actually drinking or eating at Cheers, I would be surprised - it was probably a nice little local watering hole before the TV network got their hands on it, but I don't suppose the owners are complaining. They've probably all got seven houses in the South of France and million dollar yachts moored in Marina Del Ray by now...

Update, 2012: It has now been nearly 20 years since the last episode of Cheers was filmed, and things have changed at the Bull and Finch. On the night that the last episode was broadcast back in 1993, a huge party was organised outside Cheers in Boston and the episode was shown on large screens set up for the audience. Inside, the actual cast of the TV series sat at the bar and watched the episode in comfort. Since the TV show ended, the company behind the Bull and Finch have capitalised on the Cheers name somewhat, and branches can be found around the world. Of most interest, however, is a branch of Cheers which has opened in the middle of the city in a building called Faneuil Hall, but I'll be talking about that in more detail in my next entry. For those who are too lazy to go across town, you'll be pleased to learn that the original pub has also had something of a makeover since I was there, and a virtual tour is now available on the website which allows incredibly lazy people to look around without even going anywhere near the United States. The inside has been totally opened up and redone with the familiar Cheers dark wood and brick walls and long bar with bar stools lined up along it - although there still simply isn't enough space for it to be a walk around island bar like the one on TV. They've actually done a really superb job of creating the look and feel of the Cheers we are familiar with without really having the space to do it, so I have to salute the person who did all the design work - the walls are covered in Boston and Red Sox memorabilia, and the tables along the walls by the door have been made to look as much like the ones on TV as possible. The souvenir shop is now in the back room where the pool table was on TV, and there are no stairs leading up to the ground floor because the ground floor now actually does contain a restaurant!

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.