My memories of the movies and their enduring magic - Ian McMillan

Maybe that’s why I love the film so much, and maybe that’s why I always cry whenever I watch it. Or why I sometimes sleep through it on the settee when I’ve had too much Christmas cheer.

I wonder what that last showing was like. Was there a sense of occasion, a deep sadness in the crowd?

Perhaps there was just a sense of inevitability, that the time of the small village cinema was over, that the TV in the corner was modern and that somehow the idea of going to the pictures was a little old fashioned, unless it was a big new cinema in town.

Was there indeed a crowd at all for that last showing, or were there just a few people scattered around the auditorium including me and my mam and my dad and my brother?

And was it snowing when we went out into the December air, and did my dad sing White Christmas as we walked home? I like to think he did.

So much of my early life revolved around going to the cinema and going to the pictures was just something that we did.

Me and my mate Chris Allatt went to the Saturday Morning Club at the Plaza Cinema in Wombwell and all I can recall about that is the noise that went on all the way through the films and the sheer excitement of that cacophony and the way it formed an alternative soundtrack to the serials and films we watched.

The Plaza closed as cinema in 1967 and became a full time bingo hall.

One of my formative cinema experiences was at another Empire Cinema, this time in Goldthorpe, just a short bus ride away from Darfield; this one closed in 1972 and the last film they showed was that old weepy Love Story and it can’t have been long before that when me and a couple of my grammar school mates went to see a double bill of Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, those quintessential American countercultural films of the late 1960’s which, even as we watched them, felt a long way from Goldthorpe.

Did me and the lads sing ‘Everybody’s Talking’ from Midnight Cowboy as we walked to the bus stop? I like to think we did.

To sit and watch those films in that pit village was to experience the thing that only films on a big screen can bring; a sense of being transported to somewhere different, a sense of being part of some cultural event that other people are experiencing at the same time, and that unmistakable feeling, as you walk out of an afternoon showing blinking in the light, that you are still somehow in the film; you are inhabiting it and it is inhabiting you.

My wife and I have been married for a long time and when we were first going out with each other our dates were always at the cinema; indeed I think the first film we saw was at the ABC Cinema in Barnsley and it was called The Night of The Lepus, a daft epic about killer rabbits.

And did I hop out of the cinema like a rabbit in an attempt to impress her? I’m afraid I did.

Roll the credits…