'It could have been called Sharon or Tracy," says my guide, "but we felt Rita had that certain extra something." Rita is not a baby. Rita, Queen of Speed, is Alton Towers' newest, fastest rollercoaster. I am strapped into Rita next to Emma, a schoolteacher, and propelled through the park at 100kph for 49 seconds. I would love to describe the experience but it was like a drinking binge; remember too much and it clearly wasn't fabulous. I know I didn't die as I feared I would and I can tell you that the G-force hugging my body was a pulverising 4.7G. As I stagger off I think I've lost 75% of my IQ and feel like I'm in love. What did Emma think? Can she think at all? "Fantastic!" she gibbers. "Great speed!"
Rita opened on April Fools' Day this year and she cost £8m, but for her owners, the Tussauds' Group, she is worth every speeding penny. Twenty million punters invade Britain's amusement parks each year, most of them in summer, and it's not the spinning teacup rides they seek. Babies and grannies aside, the hooded people want thrills and that means rollercoasters. New ones pop up like iron daisies nearly every year, with greater loops and heights and drops. But are these steel monsters of gravity so thrilling? Is the fun really fun? Which, if you will pardon me, is the coaster with the moster?
Oblivion is shorter than Rita, but her one coaster trick is a cracker. She drags you 60m in the air, makes you tremble on her lip and then drops you into a hole that resembles the Jubilee Line extension. The hydroelectric-whatever-mechanism pulls us up. We're now very high. I am afraid. I open my lungs for oxygen and expel it in a scream. Again, I am relieved I do not die. It is hard to describe the experience of being dropped 60m for leisure reasons. To recover, I go on a rollercoaster featuring cars with giant squirrels attached. It has no G-forces and my fellow thrill-seekers are too young to read. But I cannot hide behind a giant squirrel indefinitely. I must face Nemesis.
Nemesis is a giant testicle of a coaster; that is - it is a dangler. You don't sit in a car; instead, shoulder straps attach you to the spine of the beast. Nemesis has an octopus/sea-monster/spider theme; the queue arcs round a concrete octopus with pink painted stumps and a waterfall flowing with blood (food colouring). Nemesis is my first experience of a 360-degree turn and I discover I have excellent resistance to being hung upside down (I see a doughnut hut and even want one). Nemesis is not as fast as Oblivion, but it is rather faster than the Squirrel. Otherwise, for me, the testicle fails. It just wasn't near death enough.
Alton Towers' final challenge is Air, another dangler, which is supposed to make you feel like Superman because you lie forwards like the comic hero flying, except you have to queue to fly and you can only fly when someone presses a button. I am beginning to notice rollercoaster soft furnishings: Air's seats are a deep, glossy, rather stylish black. I queue with a group of young women wearing burkas. "Why are you here?" I ask one of them. "Because it's wicked!" she shouts. "It's fast!" The woman strapped in next to me, a schoolteacher from Wolverhampton, has an insight into the meaning of rollercoasters and why people will queue for up to three hours to feel strange. "It is a journey into danger but you know you will be safe," she says. Then we are hung upside down. I am screaming boredly now, affectedly. I am screaming because I can, not because I need to.
What will serve up my next thrill? Thorpe Park is the faded Surrey theme park I used to spend desolate Sundays in with my parents in the 1980s. Today it is occupied by teenage boys beating each other over the head for the last Benson & Hedges. Thorpe has two rollercoasters that could contend for the title of Britain's finest. One is Colossus, a pale blue-and-cream looping rollercoaster (it has 10 loops - 10!), faintly reminiscent of a Battersea drawing room, in colour at least. Colossus's theme is an ancient lost city - except is isn't lost. It is near Barnes. The second rollercoaster is Nemesis Inferno (that makes two Nemeses in one week and it is still only Tuesday), a sinister green-and-red dangler. I hate danglers. It's not the thrilling G-force that bothers me. I just don't want babies staring up my skirt.
After these two (I don't like Colossus's corkscrew, but Thorpe's Nemesis is better than Alton Towers' Nemesis - it's faster) I am beginning to feel rather victimised by gravity. I also have slight bruising to the temple after banging my head on the shoulder restraints, and my teeth ache from screaming. A Colossus attendant tells me that someone throws up at least once a day, "sometimes more".
(It is also at Thorpe that I try my first indoor rollercoaster. It is called X: No Way Out and it is a bit like a ghost train. It stops, it starts, you are sprayed with things and funny noises are made at you. The whole effect is like sitting in a teenage boy's underpants: it's dark, it's damp, it smells and you can't wait to get out. Scary indeed, but in entirely the wrong way.)
My adrenaline levels have flat-lined so I'm off to Drayton Manor Park in the Midlands, home to a rollercoaster that was opened only two weeks ago. Ed Pauley, the project manager who used to build rollercoasters for the Sultan of Brunei, ripped out a teacup ride to build G Force, a shining, scarlet, winking minx of a coaster. If I could have a rollercoaster in my garden I would choose this one. The new thing about G Force (there must always be a new thing in amusementland) is that you are upside down when you are released. Also, there are no shoulder restraints; you are held by the waist. (G Force also has a fat person seat for the chubbier coaster freaks.) Pauley's theory about rollercoasters is that "they reclaim the adrenaline rush that humans used to get from running away from sabre-toothed tigers". So the thrill is predictable. The thrill is fine.
My final stop is Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The Florida of Lancashire can surely top Oblivion and smack Rita into the sea. After all, it has a selection of 10 rollercoasters, starring the Pepsi Max Big One, which the deputy prime minister John Prescott has ridden. The Big One meanders round the park, through dinosaurs and candy-floss stalls, and it is, well, big: it is 235ft high and a mile long. It is, apparently, visible from space. ("Look!" cry the Klingons as they pass earth. "Blackpool!") I travel with Jak Horrocks, 13, who has ridden the Big One 828 times. As we are pulled up the 235ft hill for the 235ft drop (from the top you can see the very spot where Alan Bradley was run over by a tram in Coronation Street), I try to discover why Jak has ridden the Big One 828 times. I give up when I discover he doesn't really know himself.
Drop. Scream. Loop. We are spun through a giant Pepsi Max can (this is a novelty) and, as we slow down, I come face to face with an inflatable Homer Simpson. The couple in front, Emma and Paul, say they got engaged on the ride. The Big One is an incitement to odd behaviour. Last year Batman and Robin from Fathers for Justice invaded the Big One and were arrested. I'm not sure what their crime was. Impeding a rollercoaster?
I attempt Blackpool's other coasters (except a dead skeleton of a coaster, a hulk of rotting rust). There are ancient woodies, cream and peeling, smelling of salt and built when Lenin was alive. I try the indoor coaster Space Invader, where you travel through an alien landscape, fretted with stick-on stars. The Wild Mouse (1958) is horrendous, a nasty little bastard of a coaster. The turns are too sharp and I bang my elbows; perhaps it is my fault for lying down. Revolution, featured on Jim'll Fix It in 1979 (the one with the boy scouts) is far better: a single 360-degree turn and you return to base backwards. But excess breeds indifference. By the end of coaster gorge at Blackpool I have lost the ability to produce adrenaline. And I have rollercoaster name fatigue. Why don't they build a rollercoaster called Dysentery? Nausea? Athlete's Foot?
What is the star rollercoaster of the UK? Who takes the rattle-clatter bow? The latest generation of coasters are largely risk-free; they are so constrained in their saccharine danger, so health-and-safety sensitive, you are in more peril on a camel. As for rating them - how do you review a punch-up in a pub? Was the rabbit punch to the liver more dazzling than the deft kick to the ear? An autopsy might know. Rita is a Mercedes of a ride; G Force a cute bite on the arse. The ancient woodies of Blackpool have history in their aching wheels. But for me, Oblivion is sweetest. It's so nice to be dropped down a hole to forget.
