The Sound of Laughter (19 page)

Anyway, in the middle of the trailers my dad attempted to pass my mum a cup of coffee (you know, the screwtop lid that doubles as a cup), only he caught his elbow midway and tipped the scalding hot contents all over my legs and my brand new fawn-coloured chinos.

I let out a yelp. My dad shouted 'Bloody hell' and an usher shouted 'Shush'. But my parents refused to leave and so I had to sit through the whole of
Crocodile Dundee,
cold, damp and stinking of Kenco. My chinos were ruined and the coffee stains were so bad that my mum ended up throwing them out after soaking them for three nights in Omo (and that was a washing powder, not a place).

The only consolation I got after watching
Crocodile Dundee
was that on the walk back to the bus station we bumped into Alan Bennett and Kenneth Branagh having a brew on the benches outside Mothercare. They were filming an episode of
Fortunes of War
for the BBC and our local town hall was doubling for the Kremlin. Bit of irony there for the jobsworth staff.

Bolton has been used for many film locations over the years, including
The Family Way, Spring and Port Wine
and the
Die Hard
trilogy.

My mum remembers
The Family Way
having its premiere in Bolton and some of the cast including John and Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett actually came onstage at the end to take a bow. If you haven't seen
The Family Way
then I highly recommend it. It's a brilliant film with a wonderful score by Paul McCartney. Only you won't catch it on telly in the afternoon before
Channel 4 Racing,
as the storyline is a little racy. It was actually considered quite contentious at the time of its release in 1966 and it was almost banned in the US as a result of its controversial subject matter. The plot, in a nutshell, is that Hywel Bennett can't get an erection. I think that may have been the tag line for the film, which probably explains why the Yanks frowned upon it.

Even today I get a small thrill reading the weekly cinema listings in the paper. It's another habit I formed as a boy and something that became particularly important to me when I worked as an usher, as the cinema listings governed the quality of shifts you'd be getting at work.

If we had a Disney or kids' film on, the cinema would be full of little brats and custody dads. Mrs Hayworth loved custody dads because they always spent a shitload of money on eats and treats out of guilt. Or if we had an adult action-type film on with Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme then the cinema would be empty in
the afternoon but full of solvent-abusing knobheads at night, so it was swings and roundabouts really.

I liked it when the films changed every week – we always got different ones each Friday during term time. But during the school holidays you could forget it. Then we'd have the same big blockbusters on for weeks at a time. Personally I'd be happy if I never saw
Batman Forever
ever again, having watched it over forty times during the summer of '95. The same goes for
Independence Day
and
Judge Dredd
(or
Judge Dreadful
as I prefer to call it). In fact, the only film I enjoyed watching time and time again was
Babe.
You know, the one with the talking pig? It broke my bloody heart every time I saw it and put me off bacon for months.

My main job as an usher was ripping tickets. It was a skilful job – I used to have to tear the tickets into two and then thread the stubs on to a needle attached to a piece of string with a knot in the bottom. It was all very high-tech. Connie Parlow, another usher, showed me the ropes (or should I say string?). She'd been at the Lido since
Teen Wolf Too
and knew every trick in the book, which I found slightly ironic as I don't think she could read.

We had other duties as well as ripping tickets. Like sweeping out the auditorium after three hundred kids had trashed it during
Casper.
Scraping chewed sweets
and bubbly off the back of seats was always a favourite duty of mine, especially on baking hot Saturday afternoons in August. And yes, I am being sarcastic.

It was also an usher's job to be responsible for the upkeep of the toilets. Topping up toilet rolls, towels and soap. The flushing of many a buoyant turd and the mopping up of piss from leaky urinals. Funny they neglected to mention any of that in the job description.

I remember we were short-staffed once during the big summer holidays and Jackie who worked on the kiosk had to both issue customers with tickets and rip them at the same time.

'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I don't normally do this, I've usually got a lady at the top of the stairs ripping but she's in the toilets changing a towel.'

I had to laugh when she told me later what she'd said, as that was just a bit too much information for the customers.

The downside of being an usher was that I got to see behind the scenes of a cinema, which took away some of the magic. Most people don't get to see the other side (apart from Derek Acorah, but we won't go there). I had a similar experience when I did the
My Mum Wants a Bungalow
tour. People would come backstage expecting to see me living a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, with expensive caterers and big coaches. It came as a bit of a shock when
they discovered that I just rolled up in a Peugeot at the last minute with twelve balloons in the glovebox and a meal deal from Boots.

That's what it was like at the cinema. Behind the scenes it was just an empty shell. I'd always imagined the cinema to be a lot bigger on the inside but it was more like the Tardis in reverse. And once I got to see behind the facade I was shocked. Because the Lido was also in an extremely bad state of repair and they were losing business to state-of-the-art multiplexes in the neighbouring towns. Perhaps that's why there seemed no financial sense in pouring money into a dated, crumbling cinema like ours. In fact, if it wasn't for weekend custom, the place would have been shut down long ago, as we were more or less empty during the week.

Mrs Hayworth and the staff all knew deep down that their days were numbered and that it would only be a matter of time before a fancy new twenty-screen multiplex would be springing up on a retail park on the outskirts of town.
^*7
But like the band on the
Titanic
we still played on and continued to tread water. Quite literally in fact when it came to the Gents upstairs.

When head office stopped sending money for
development things fell apart very quickly. We ran out of letter 'M's for the front canopy and had to make do with capital 'E's turned on their sides. The curtains in Screen 1 were so thick and heavy after accumulating sixty years' worth of dust that they slid off their tracks one day before
Evita
had even started.

Mortified, Mrs Hayworth had been to apologise to the customer and give him a refund because he couldn't see the screen. That's right, 'the customer', and even he wasn't really bothered. Old Billy the bearded tramp couldn't have cared less about seeing Eva Peron and had just come in for a warm out of the cold. Head office refused to pay for the curtain to be fixed and so as a result it stayed open permanently. Mind you, nobody ever commented on the curtain in Screen 2 and that had been broke since
My Fair Lady.

Then we got rats. It must have been a combination of dodgy drains and hot weather. One showed up in the bowl while a female customer was sat on the bog. She nearly screamed the place down and I didn't blame her. It's one of my worst fears is that, which is why I always put some toilet roll down the bowl first so I can hear the little bastards coming. Mrs Hayworth had to bribe the traumatised lady into accepting a year's cinema pass and a large popcorn so that she wouldn't blab to the local papers.

We didn't have enough money to call environmental health out to deal with the rats so Bert, the projectionist, put down some illegal rat poison his brother had brought back from the Falklands. I think Bert was the only partially sighted dwarf projectionist in the country. He used to have a pair of binoculars and a stool so he could see the films through his little porthole at the back. There was almost a riot once when he accidentally played the trailer for
Striptease
before the start of
Pocahontas.
I had to put the cleaning lights on and apologise individually to each and every parent.

I always found Bert to be a tad eccentric. Mind you, I think I'd be eccentric too if I'd been cooped up in a projectionist booth since before we went decimal. He lived in that booth morning, noon and night. He'd had so much time to kill over the years that he'd crafted an exact replica of the Paramount Mountain out of used chewing gum. Now that's a level of dedication that I can't relate to.

I'd often go up and visit him during my tea breaks. It looked more like a flat than a projectionist booth. He had a hammock, a slow cooker and photographs of his family on the walls. Occasionally I'd sit out on his roof terrace sipping tea out of an official
Species II
cup and watching the sun set over Bolton. It was truly beautiful.

He'd tell me incredible stories about all the mishaps
he'd had over the years, like celluloid stock igniting and almost burning down the cinema, and how he used to have to cycle across town from one cinema to the other in order to swap reels. Hold on, that's a scene from
Cinema Paradiso,
the lying little swine.

He once took me on a tour of the cinema but it wasn't the cinema I knew. We climbed up through a serving hatch at the back of Screen 3 where the notorious 'adult lounge' used to be. We scrambled onwards into the rafters and over the asbestos. Then he swung his huge rechargeable torch round to reveal something I never expected to see. It was the remains of a cinema screen.

'This is how it used to be before the arseholes destroyed it,' he said angrily.

I could just make out the top half of a cinema screen and it was straddled on either side by two huge gold columns. Over the top of the screen was a perfectly painted mural of a gold-coloured gondola surrounded by leafy green vines. It took my breath away and for a few minutes I felt like Indiana Jones uncovering a piece of hidden treasure.

'What happened to it?' I said.

He told me that the Lido used to be one enormous screen but after video arrived in the late seventies they were bought out by a local property developer, Den Perry. He took a chainsaw to the stunning art deco
framework and cut the entire building into two storeys. Then Bert shone his torch lower and revealed where the columns had been mercilessly hacked in half. Fibreglass insulation had been strewn all over the chipboard floor.

'He turned downstairs into a nightclub,' said Bert, 'and Perry did quite well for himself until someone found a dead body in the cellar. Then he turned it into a Laser Quest and buggered off to Marbella.'

Finally Bert took me round to the back of the building and, unlocking a padlocked fire door, he led me up an old staircase into some half-flooded dressing rooms. It was eerie – they still had the costume rails standing in the room and some torn variety bill posters on the wall from years ago. They were left over from the days when the cinema doubled as a theatre.

'They've all played here at one time or other,' he said proudly, with the water almost up to his waist. 'Laurel and Hardy, The Beatles, Depeche Mode.' I was astonished that I'd been working with so much history around me and had never realised.

Funnily enough, the cinema was demolished just a few weeks ago (another bloody building demolished behind me; I must be jinxed).
The Bolton Evening News
did a story about the demolition company uncovering this hidden screen in the back of the building, with a hand-painted mural of a gondola and two gold columns
on either side of it. I felt honoured to have seen it years before with Bert by torchlight.

To mark the hundredth anniversary of cinema in Britain, the powers that be held a National Cinema Day in May 1995, which again basically meant everybody could see any film they desired all day for one English pound. As a result we were packed out.

I remember being stood at the bottom of the stairs watching
Twelve Monkeys
and keeping an eye out for crafty smokers sneaking a fag on the back row. That's when I saw a rat. I wasn't sure what it was at first but then when I focused my eyes during the bright scenes and I could see it really was a rat slowly making its way down the steps of the far aisle.

'Oh my God, if anybody sees it there'll be a stampede,' I thought. 'They'll shut us down and I've got a lot of overtime coming up.'

The rat seemed to be swaying from side to side as if it was drunk. Then I realised that it must have swallowed some of Bert's poison and was about to croak it. I made a split-second decision and, casually walking over to the far aisle, I booted it straight under a radiator. Everybody was too busy watching the film to notice and thank God because it was a big fat frigger. It was also the closest I'd been to a rat since I brushed passed Jeffrey Archer at the Southport Flower Show.

You know, behind the scenes the cinema may have been held together by Sellotape and string, but once you'd swept the last few remaining pieces of popcorn under the seats, turned on the red gel mood lighting at the front of the stage and given Bert the thumbs up to stick on his eight track of the
Hits of Richard Clayderman,
nobody could ever see the join at the Lido.

It must have been hard for Mrs Hayworth though. She was a nice lady who'd been working in cinema most of her life. And we actually used to get on quite well, which was a first for me when it came to a manager. She must have felt as though she was banging her head against a wall sometimes, in fact I actually caught her doing it once in the storeroom but I never let on.

She used to get really upset if she ever overheard any of us talking about visiting the multiplexes.

'They've not got anything we haven't got,' she'd say, but they had and she knew it. They had curtains that closed for a kick off, toilets that didn't leak and they also didn't have drunken rats staggering down the aisles. She was just fooling herself.