Matinée Idle

Rainy weekends … I love 'em.
It's Wimbledon fortnight so it's going to rain all weekend and instead of the tennis the BBC will show loads of trashy old movies.
Hoorah!
Whether it's Deanna Durbin singing "I Love To Yodel" or Gary Cooper or Doris Day or anything with Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monsters in it I'll be there, crashed out on the sofa with a big mug of coffee and a bigger grin.
I don't have satellite or cable and - living just beyond the middle of nowhere - my TV reception is so crappy that all I can get is four channels. And on a rainy weekend that means Old Movie Heaven.

Saturday Matinées at the Regal cinema were one of the great joys of my youth.
Every Saturday at tea time the peeling art deco façade would disgorge hundreds of shrieking children, all of us acting out the magic we had seen on screen … Mock swordfights for swashbucklers; mock gunfights (and unfeasibly large moustaches) for "Viva Villa", parting the local river for any Chuck Heston Bible-fest, and best of all: Doug Mc.Clure!

Woohoo! I have to admit I almost succumbed and bought the Doug Mc.Clure boxed set of DVDs the other day in HMV. Now that I'm (slightly) more grown up I can better appreciate CarolynMunroe running around with him in a fur bikini. Mmmmmmmmmm …

Bollocks to Spielberg! THIS is Movie Heaven

And those terrible, terrible supporting features … inevitably black and white efforts from the Childrens' Film Foundation, usually starring a young Melvyn Hayes and a bunch of kids in a bus chasing ne'er-do-wells around London; or Laurel and Hardy.

Of course, we only realised much later that our parents were not handing over their hard-earned thruppenny bits (the front seats were then thruppence - three old pennies - the thruppenny bit being a bizarre, multifaceted lump of brass, going up to ninepence as I got older) to finance our education in the history of cinema … Oh, no!
They were having sex!
All through the sixties, the shops and streets of our town were emptied on a Saturday afternoon, when every parent managed to dump their kids at the Regal for a few hours and take advantage of the "something for the weekend" bought at the local barbers' shop.
Back then, we never realised such things went on. We knew where babies came from, having seen wildlife documentaries, but figured our parents had only "mated" twice to produce little brother Full and myself.

But by the time we realised the awful truth we were hooked on bad movies.

In our early teens we graduated to Bungay Fleapit (Full has posted an educational photo taken in Bungay on his blog).
Bungay Fleapit was a filthy, fly-blown shit-hole with a faulty projector, run by two elderly and very cranky perverts. What made it a Mecca for underage movie freaks was:
- The old guys didn't give a shit how young you were, they just wanted your money;
- We could take beer in;
- Monday nights were all night horror movies;
- Thursday nights were all night sex movies.
Teenage Heaven. A cinema full of drunk fourteen-year-old boys watching exploitation and splatter movies in those glorious few years before they all got banned.
At some point during the Monday gore-fest the screen would go white and huge silhouetted fingers would fumble a 35mm slide into the projector. It would always be painted red (you could see the brushmarks) and have Thursday's movies scratched into the paint, complete with mis-spellings. Every expense spared.
We could then decide whether to fork out for such delights as The Virgin Witches, The Sex Twins, Swedes In The Snow or of course, the bestiality classic On The Farm.
They would also do softcore Russ Meyer nights for those whose interests ran to unfeasibly large breasts and nazi regalia (I remember David Neech fast asleep and snoring loudly throughout Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls while we decorated him with food and trash off the floor).

And you wonder why I turned out like I did …

So this weekend - like any rainy weekend - I will spend my afternoons in glorious black and white, re-living more innocent days.
Unless the tennis is on, in which case I'll watch girls in miniskirts leaping around and grunting.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.