Penistone Paramount: Cinema celebrates 110 years of entertainment
It has always been the entertainment hub of the area, and this year a much-loved South Yorkshire venue celebrates its 110th anniversary. When so many of the county’s entertainment venues have been either demolished, or stand forlorn and empty, The Penistone Paramount always warm and welcoming – and alive with promise.
The secret of its on-going success is that it has adapted with the changing times, retaining old values while pushing new boundaries. Its current brochure offers cinema – of course – with latest releases – plus live music, theatre, musicals and comedy nights. There’s pantomime on the horizon, ballet (the small stage area is phenomenally adaptable) choirs, school events and the famed Barnsley Concert Band, who themselves are celebrating half a century of delighting audiences this year. It seats just 344 people, and there are already signs that shows will play to capacity.
During this historic anniversary year there is the Penistone Film Festival, in the middle of October, and on October 11 the internationally-renowned Mark Herman, from the USA makes his only British appearance with a hugely popular concert that will bring in audience from across the north, and a week later Donald MacKenzie will be at the keyboard to accompany a screening of the 1925 movie classic The Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney displaying some of his most grotesque and self-devised make-up in the title role. Some audiences a century back were so amazed by Chaney’s appearance that they ran screaming for the exits. The Paramount definitely doesn’t do things by halves. What it has done, for all those years, has kept its finger on the pulse of what the local audiences want.
And nothing tells us more about that adaptation than its very beginning. For it started life as a local authority Assembly Rooms with a superlative sprung wooden dance floor. There is nothing in archive material which tells us why, but the idea failed to take off. There were dances, but apparently they weren’t very successful – and one of the reasons surely must have been that many of the local lads immediately enlisted when World War I began in the late summer of the year, and were then shipped off to the Western Front.
The Assembly Rooms (which were opening in the late October of 1914 by the mayor of Huddersfield, Jospeh Blamires Esq – Penistone was then part of that local authority) limped on into 1915. The frontage was designed by an architect called Henry R Collins, and it was in that curious mongrel style of the day, part way between Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Then as now, it is oddly beautiful. There was a heated debate about what the council could make of their property and it was decided to turn it into a cinema. And so, on November 15, 1915, it changed its name to the Town Hall Picture House. The Penistone Paramount, as it is now called, is still in public ownership (Barnsley Council are now in charge) and it is one of the very few cinemas in the UK which is owned and run by a local authority.
One hundred and ten years ago, the cinema was on one level only – with seats screwed into and secured on that beautiful sprung floor. The boards are still there today. In the twenties, it was doing so well, that it was extended – not sideways, but internally, and upwards, and a new balcony was added. That brought seating capacity up to more than 900 people.
Brian Barnsley has been the manager for more than two decades (he’s also the facilities and Programming Manager) and can remember when the bar area was renovated some many years back. “When we started peeling back the old paper, and revealing the original woodwork, you would not believe the colour it was. Dark, impenetrable brown. Stained with paint? Not a bit of it, this was the collected nicotine of decades. We all took a step backwards, and wondered how anyone in the balcony could ever possibly see the images on the screen, through the fug of thick baccy smoke that drifted up from below.” The Paramount is now completely non-smoking.
The Paramount is just one of very few cinemas that survive from the earliest days of cinema – there are perhaps a couple of hundred in the British Isles, and there are some fine examples in Yorkshire, the Hyde Park Picture House and the Holmfirth Picturedrome among them. But why “Paramount”? The cinema was re-named as The Metro Cinema in the mid-eighties, but then the Penistone Cinema Organ Trust made a purchase. They’d heard about a wonderful 1000-pipe organ which had once been one of the attractions of the deluxe Paramount Theatre in Birmingham. When that venue closed, the organ was carefully dismantled by enthusiasts, and moved to The Regal, in Oswestry. That in turn closed, and again, the organ miraculously survived. The Trust bought it in 2000 and then they and the Penistone civic authorities agreed to give it a new, and permanent home.
The Paramount today offers an enviable mix of community events, concerts, live performances, comedy nights, screenings from The Royal Opera House and London’s West End, tribute acts, if it fits on the screen or the compact stage. The Paramount will book it. And that continues a public tradition that all started within weeks of its first opening – one of the first events was a fund-raiser for the local wounded troops of World War II. It raised what today would be around £2,000, a remarkable sum for a small venue in a community devastated by the horrors of war.
The auditorium was refurbished in the summer of 2020 and now benefits from new seating, carpets and decoration. The house lights have been upgraded and are now LED with far more colour options, and the front steps were restored to their former glory.
For Brian, one of the many joys of his job is being able to attend special screenings of film classics. And, he says, he too pays for his own tickets.
“Community involvement, or every level and across the ages, from screenings for schoolkids to our loyal pensioners. We’ve been here for everyone for the last 110 years. So, here’s to the next 110.”
www.PenistoneParamount.co.uk