What's right with it would be easier to answer. As it's been said, it's a complete dump. It used to be a really good place to visit and me and DH used to take the kids there pre 2005 and and stay a week. 5 or 6 holidays we had there, before the kids and after. (3 to 5 days at a time...) You could just walk around the Pleasure Beach, go on a few rides if you wanted to, go into the wax works, the sea Life Centre, the tower etc, and it would be quite reasonably priced. Now I'm sure it's something like 30 pounds each to go in the tower, 25 pounds for the sea Life Centre, and about 40 or 50 to get into the Pleasure Beach - just even to look around it .. you can't just go in and have a look round now you have to pay 40 or 50 pounds.
In addition dozens of hen nights and stag nights, with anything between 10 and 20 drunken women and drunken men (in each gang,) hang around the streets anything after 6:00 o'clock at night ... Thursday Fridays and Saturdays there are just a no no after about 5:00 PM.
From the seafront to about a mile and a half back, it's an absolute slum, dirty, smelly streets, broken syringes on the backstreets, broken bottles, cigarette ends, rubbish, filth, broken and run down properties, and a certain type of people gunning for you to sell a piece of heather for 2 quid, and then demanding more if you're gullible enough to get your purse out.
There's no decent shops either really. Just crappy shops that sell tat, and the usual stores you get in every town and city, in the town... As for the lights, they're a bit 'meh' because they stay the same for about 5 years! I wouldn't go just for the lights. It's not worth it. They're not that amazing.
Places that used to be nice little bed and breakfasts, have turned into slums where the council put people on benefits in. That's not a dig at people on benefits by the way, but for some reason the council seemed to have taken places like Rhyl and Blackpool, and even stretching out to (previously) nice places like Colwyn Bay now in North Wales, and some places in Essex, and they're just sticking all the people on benefits there, who they can't seem to find any proper social housing for.. It was supposed to be a temporary measure for maybe four to seven months but I know people who've been in this situation for five years now.
The credit crunch started in 2008, and that seemed to be coupled with Travelodge and Premier Inn offering really good deals. So the bed and breakfasts and guest houses in a lot of these seaside towns, really struggled to fill the rooms. So if the council offered them six months rent upfront for people on benefits (who they couldn't house,) to stay there, they were snapping their hand off. So lots of people are still there. And whilst some are OK, there are some that are NOT so 'OK.'
But yeah, it's sad cos it used to be lovely.
To be fair, if you go inland say one and a half miles away from the seafront around Stanley Park and the zoo, where the nicer, kind of big old houses with huge gardens and big driveways are, there are some really nice properties and some nice areas, and it's actually quite decent back there. That first mile to mile and a half from the sea is an absolute fucking shithole now though.
As I say we went on five or six, 3 to 5 day trips there some 18 to 25 years ago, and me and DH went on a day trip about three or four years ago (as we hadn't been for about 4 years and had a bit of an urge to go.).... It was an absolute shit tip. Would never go again. It gets worse every time we go.