My Give-a-Show...

I used to love going to the cinema when I was a child. I could hardly wait until Saturday afternoon came around so that I could go off to the Saturday matinee with my friends. It cost one shilling and three pence (about six pence these days). Off I’d go, armed with my packet of fruit gums to the picture house on East Street to see a cowboy, a funny, the occasional Disney. I can’t definitely remember a single film that I watched on these outings (apart from Mary Poppins) but I think I remember Summer Holiday, Tom Thumb, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolfman, The Wizard of Oz, High Noon and, rather inappropriately given it’s rating, The Man With the X-Ray Eyes – all for the first time at the Saturday matinee.

My Uncle Charlie was the projectionist. He did everything in town – well everything exciting or interesting, he really was a wonder. Once he took me up the stairs beyond and above the balcony into the tiny projector room to see the cinema projector. That was a wonder too, all lights, and reels, and cogs and buttons. Charlie showed me how to fit the reels of film to the projector wheel with a huge wing-nut, and where the bulb was, and how to press the big red start button, and how to get the second reel ready so that there wasn’t a break in the film.

When I grew up I wanted to be a projectionist.

It may have been Charlie who bought me my Give-A-Show projector one Christmas, although it was probably my Mum and Dad, but what a great present! The blue battery powered projector had an adjustable lens with a torch bulb and reflector unit fitted behind it. It came with lots of cardboard cartoon strips, seven panels on each, each panel a celluloid printed picture. The cartoon strip were inserted into a slot behind the lens and when the projector was switched on the image would shine and be projected onto to the old white sheet that I would hang from the back of the sofa. You couldn’t make the image too large or you lost definition and colour, but what fun it was.

Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Quick Draw McGraw - all my favourite cartoons were there and later, mainly for my birthday, I was given other strip cartoons, educational strips - The seven Wonders of the World, The Story of the Cutty Sark, the History of the Tower of London.

Sometimes I would invite the other children around to watch a show - Jimmy and Phillip Braham, Jackie Wood, Vincent, my cousins Gina and Ian. I’d set up a row of small stools behind the sofa, dim the lights, project the shows onto my white sheet and invent and narrate stories to the pictures as I gently pulled the cardboard strips through the projector’s slot. Sometimes I handed out the paper tickets that I’d made to collect before the show solemnly tearing them in half before letting them into our living room. Once I charged my audience a fee, a penny a show but my Mum made me give the money back.

Eventually the cardboard strips buckled and ripped with use, the celluloid panels faded and shrank from the heat and then the bulb went – Pfffwft. My projector was assigned to the old cardboard box in the cupboard under the stairs where all of my discarded toys ended up once I had tired of them - and I moved on to something else.

My career as a cinema projectionist was over almost before it started - and then I discovered Meccano…