The Sound of Laughter

by Peter Kay

  The other thing I always loved about the Odeon was the smell of it, that sumptuous aroma of warm popcorn and Westlers hot dogs. I know all cinemas have that smell but for some reason it always smelt better at the Odeon.

  Not that we ever bought popcorn or hot dogs at the cinema, oh God no, we used to smuggle all our own treats in with us. Well, I say we, it was my mum who used to do all the smuggling. We'd visit the paper shop across the road from the cinema and stock up on eats and treats. Pop, crisps, lollies, chocolate, the lot. Then nonchalantly my mum would stagger into the foyer, scrunching as she walked over to the counter with a bottle of Rola Cola down each sleeve of her anorak and her pockets stuffed full of Twister crisps and Sherbet Dib Dabs.

  'Can I have three for Pete's Dragon please?' she'd say as casually as she could muster.

  Smuggling treats into the cinema has been a hard habit to break, much to the disgust of my wife. Even today I can't stop myself from visiting the Texaco garage on the way to the multiplex in order to stock up on Evian water and a family bag of Revels. Some people may consider me to be a tight arse but it's hard to fight tradition. It's been bred into me not to 'pay those cinema prices'.

  Once every twelve months I'll treat myself to a pick 'n' mix selection but even then I try and stick to the light stuff like marshmallows and flumps. Stick three pieces of fudge in the bag and you can be paying over a fiver. I'm surprised they don't wear a mask and a striped jumper at the tills, the robbing swines.

  Another thing I liked about the Odeon was the Saturday-morning kids club. We used to watch old Norman Wisdom films and serials like The Double Deckers, Banana Splits and Big John, Little John. We also watched one with Charlie Drake where he played a professor who shrunk to the size of a telephone after drinking some kind of potion. I can't remember what it was called but it wasn't much good.

  They also used to play games at the kids club, have competitions and occasionally they'd have publicity stunts. Like the time three hundred of us turned up to watch Spiderman scale the walls of the Odeon at half nine in the morning. Well, it obviously wasn't the real Spiderman, just some fella in a fancy dress costume. A bit like Fathers for Justice.

  It was chucking it down with rain but we all let out a joyous cheer when Spiderman turned the corner in a Hillman Avenger. But our happiness was to be short-lived when some council workers turned up with the local health and safety officer and told Spiderman he wasn't allowed to climb the Odeon. They said it was too much of a risk and blamed adverse weather conditions.

  We were gutted and vented our anger by pelting the council workers with pop bottles out of a skip at the back of the building. As a result the kids club was closed for two weeks and we missed the regional premiere of Digby — the Biggest Dog in the World.

  Bloody jobsworth council. It's a pity they weren't on the ball as much when I played the town hall on my last tour and my bloody dressing room got robbed. Unbelievable. I played almost every theatre in Britain and then got robbed in my home town. Charming!

  One thing you don't get at the cinema any more these days is double bills. They were all the rage in the seventies and eighties. I can remember my grandad sneaking me off school and taking me to watch The Pink Panther Strikes Again and The Spy Who Loved Me. I thought double bills were great because you could be in the cinema for up to four hours at a time.

  My arse was numb watching double bills such as The Black Hole and Condorman, Hooper and Airplane!, My Little Pony and The Killing Fields. I made the last one up but it wouldn't have been out of place back in the day when the double bill was king. They really had some bizarre combinations of films thrown together. Regardless of genre, cast or certification. Like Sweeney 2 and Convoy, The French Connection and Bugsy Malone, and I swear I once saw a listing in our local paper for Mary Poppins and Deep Throat.

  That would have been at the Lido. They went slightly pornographic for a few years after the cinema industry slipped into a decline due to the arrival of home video. They resorted to showing soft porn in their 'adult lounge' as they called it. It was actually an upstairs cafe they had turned into a seventy-seat cinema screen.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of town the Odeon struggled on, managing to hold its head up high as one of the last bastions of traditional family entertainment. And while they were screening children's classics such as Dumbo, Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Lido had resorted to showing filth like I am a Nymphomiac, Sandra is Anybody's and Snow White Does the Seven Dwarfs.

  Cinema came out of its decline in the mid-eighties thanks to box-office smashes like Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Not to mention the Rocky and Rambo films. The latter was banned by the local council after being considered too violent for public consumption. Bloody council killjoys again. I noticed they weren't so quick to stop the Lido having a late night screening of Titty Titty Gang Bang.

  I was at the cinema every week during my teenage years and continued to be just as totally consumed with it as I was when I first saw Superman and Star Wars. I'd run out of the cinema each week believing I was a character from the film I'd just watched. I remember thinking I was Marty McFly on my pretend skateboard, sliding through the snow to the bus station after watching Back to the Future. Or sweeping the leg all the way to the 582 bus with Paddy after watching The Karate Kid. Both of us waxing on and waxing off as we climbed the stairs to the top deck.

  Another film I went to watch with Paddy was Rocky IV, the one where he fights the Russian. It was a huge success when it was first released and everybody wanted to see it. We sneaked out of school early and caught a bus into town so we could catch the teatime showing at half four. The plan worked. The place was only a third full but as we exited through the fire doors at the end of the film we walked into pandemonium. People were queuing twice round the block and down to the red-light district. Anyway, a scuffle had broken out after the cinema staff informed the customers that they were now full. In the bedlam that ensued someone smashed the glass casing on the poster for Death Wish 3 and the police had to be called to restore peace. It made it on to the headlines of the Bolton Evening News the next day: 'ROCKY RIOTS CINEMA STAFF ON THE ROPES'.

  Eventually the Lido shed its soft-porn image and was rejuvenated as a Cannon cinema with a Monday-night film club. You could watch any film you desired for a pound. My mum and dad used to take me every week and we had a great time watching films such as The Jewel of the Nile, Remo – Unarmed and Dangerous and Clockwise with John Cleese, to name but a few.

  We also went to see Crocodile Dundee, an experience I'll never forget as that was the time my dad decided to take a flask of coffee into the cinema with him. They sold it in the foyer but of course my dad refused point-blank to 'pay those cinema prices'.

  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. Ove
r 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.