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In Binge Drink Britain, bouncers are on the front line. Owen Amos spends a Friday night on the door in Stockton and discovers just what doormen put up with.

MARK Kidd, bouncer, has suffered a broken leg, a fractured skull and a smashed wrist at work. He's been stabbed in the arm, had a fingertip sliced off and been attacked by a madwoman with a stiletto. At work. Tonight, I'm with him outside a Stockton nightclub. At work. I pray for peace and keep an eye on girls in heels.

The leg, smashed in three places, happened while tackling a knifeman outside a Bournemouth nightclub.

"They jumped up and down on it," says Mark, matter-of-factly. "It could have been amputated.

They spent nine hours putting it back together." His right leg, packed with steel plates, is now a half-inch shorter than the other.

The fractured skull happened at the end of a night, after asking someone to leave. The guy responded with an ashtray, whacked across Mark's head. The stiletto woman, too drunk to stand, had also been asked to leave. She wanted to stay. Jousting with her Jimmy Choos, unsurprisingly, convinced no one.

Mark has, I realise, lived through an episode of Street Crime UK. That grey and green CCTV footage, starring street-corner scrappers, is familiar.

He's been there. Does he not feel fear?

"Everybody will experience an adrenaline dump," Mark says. "It's part of fight or flight. What your body's doing is giving you extra speed, extra power, making you unable to feel pain. People mistake that for fear."

Easy mistake to make, I reckon. Does he get threatened?

"It runs like this," he says, smiling. "They shout You bald ****, I'm going to come back and get you, going to come back and stab you'. I have been in situations with rather large crime figures involved, but mostly I ignore it. If I had a pound for every time someone threatened to kill me, I'd be a rich man."

Tonight, thankfully, should be quiet. We're at Cellar 51, a nice bar with a band that plays Suspicious Minds and Ruby Tuesday. The punters are mixed: young lads wearing T-shirts, students wearing embroidered hoodies, women wearing too much hair spray and perfume.

I'M 6ft 2ins, so could pass, from distance, as a bouncer. On closer inspection, my clothes betray me. I wear a suit, black shirt and - for some reason - a red tie. I look like I'm off to a disco. In the 1980s. Mind, the tie's not all that betrays me. There's also my absolute absence of menace.

At 10pm, the punters stroll in, cheery and fairly sober. Mark greets them all. Not just good manners, I learn. "I'm gauging their reaction, their response,"

he says. "If they have attitude, or are drunk, they don't come in."

It's not the only precaution.

"All the time, I'm clocking everyone who's walking up and down the street," he says. "Are they fighting?

Are they p****** in the street? Are they throwing traffic cones? It's the easiest job in the world letting them in. It's the hardest getting them out."

Mark, 44, has worked doors for 19 years, mainly in Bournemouth. He's seen the social scene shift from terrace culture's tail-end, to raves, to the 1990s cocaine epidemic. Now, he says, more people carry knives. He could write a book.

On his first night, in Bournemouth, he stopped known drug dealers entering his club. "We knew who they are, and they weren't too happy," he says.

"We were in the firing line at that point."

But, Mark says, he immediately felt comfortable.

"You don't do this job on your own - you work as a team. When you try to do things on your own, it doesn't work. You end up in hospital. You don't see police officers or prison warders working alone.

"If there are two, three, five guys fighting and you go over to sort it out alone, what's going to happen?

They're going to end up leathering you."

Mark - whose colleague, Sean, takes the entry fee - will win more arguments than he loses. He's 6ft, a martial artist and sturdy. As well as working doors, he trains other bouncers in everything from calming conflict, to law and locks. A bouncers' licence doesn't mean you can bounce, he says, like a driving licence doesn't mean you can drive. Some bouncers ruin others' reputations.

"It's like any job - you've either got talent or you haven't," he says. "Not a lot of people have got what it takes. You don't have to be a ninja, or Bruce Lee, but you do have to stand up and be counted. You have to have b*******.

"You're there to stop trouble, and if it happens, you have to step up. You have to get violent people off the premises. I can tell more or less straight away if someone can do the job or not. It's not about posing and chatting up women. It's about sensing danger. A good doorman can stop trouble before it happens."

By 12pm the atmosphere changes. Students stumble up stairs, eyes in different directions, mouths working overtime. Most want to befriend the bouncer. He's the hard man, he's in charge. They want to bask in his image. Problem is, when they're speaking, he loses concentration. Or, as he puts it: "When they're dribbling s*** in your ear, you take your eye off the ball."

So, when they start conversation he, more often that not, ignores them. "People think I'm ignorant, but I'm not," says Mark, who hasn't drunk since he was 22. "I just don't want to talk to them." Some, too drunk to spot the journalist, talk to me. About the town, or the tunes. Or, more frequently, the tie. It's bad enough being sober round tanked-up mates, when they're strangers, it's tedious. I think of times when I've tried to befriend bouncers - we all have, I think - and I feel ashamed.

Then, a young lad approaches sheepishly. "I'm really sorry about last week," he tells Mark. "Sorry about that mate. Really sorry. Am I all right to get in?" Last week, the lad tried to speak to Mark. When that approach was declined, the lad kicked off.

Mark, satisfied with the chastened drip, lets him in.

There is, though, no trouble. The punters harp on, but are harmless. It's not like this everywhere.

In six months at a Darlington club, Mark saw more trouble than in the past six years combined. In some ways, he says, he prefers the rowdier spots.

"In high-pressure premises, you're on your toes all the time," he says. "You're running the gauntlet all evening."

By the early hours, I can barely grip my pen. My fingers are icy after just three hours on the pavement.

Before I go, I ask Mark bouncing's best bit.

"When you make the world a better place," he says, laughing. "But when you stop someone getting hit, or stop someone getting glassed. That's satisfying."

I head to my car, past a Street Crime UK scene.

Girls in short skirts bawling, lads in short sleeves brawling. I sit in my car, heaters blasting, with two thoughts. I'm glad I'm not a bouncer. I'm very glad some people are.

9:02am Friday 28th March 2008

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