Ian McMillan: Cinematic memories of an evening of laughter

I made that bit up about the haggis and black bun, and I suspect my dad might have made up the bit about them running out of the pictures shouting “Help ma Boab!”, but it’s true that my granddad twiddled with the machines in the projection booth so that all those lowland Scots could experience Al Jolson and Tex Ritter singing and speaking. Maybe, then, it’s because of my granddad that I love going to the pictures. Although, because of the kind of films I enjoy watching, I prefer the word cinema. To be honest, I like long, slow foreign films with subtitles. I like films where nothing happens for ages then something very small happens then nothing happens for ages after that. When I was at college in Stafford, decades ago, I went to the film society and me and my mates Dave Thorpe and Andy Swift used to revel in Russian epics set in miles of frozen tundra or French angst-marathons lit by cigarette smoke and the sound of spiky Paris jazz. One week we were meant to watch an East European minimalist classic and they sent the wrong film; they despatched some kind of travelogue about the delights of canals in Holland.

We sat for a while as a breezy Dutch voice-over informed us of things none of us could understand because none of us were Dutch, although Dave Thorpe was from Newark, which is flat. After a while, a quiffed, corpulent, flat-capped Dutchman was seen to waddle out of his house and get on a bike; he cycled breezily along the side of canal whistling melodiously, which made the voice-over man chuckle for reasons none of us understood. Dick Ellis was the hyperactive lecturer in charge of the film society and at this point he jumped on the stage to explain and apologise; unfortunately he hadn’t told John Morris, whose turn it was to run the creaking projector that week and who was trying to do a sociology essay in the booth.

The film carried on as Dick delivered his little speech. I can still remember his jerky puppet-like dance of annoyance as the Dutchman cycled across his face, then cycled back. At one point, Dick appeared to have two giant Dutch bicycle wheels for eyes, which reduced Dave Thorpe to tears of hysterical laughter, both then and for the rest of that term, whenever we reminded him. Maybe we should have left it at that, and I blame Andrew Swift for the debacle that happened in Dick’s next English lecture, the one on Virginia Woolf. It was Swifty’s idea that somebody should turn off the lights in the lecture theatre and then a lad from Birkenhead whose name I’ve forgotten should cycle across the stage in a flat cap, whistling.

Maybe it’s good that I’ve blocked out most of what happened next; I can vaguely remember a collapsing bike, the lights flickering, the shouts, the swearing. I should have got some black bun to stuff my ears with…