The Little Theatre, Bath: a lament

Since 2014, besides my job in publishing, I’ve also done part time work at the Little Theatre cinema in Bath, doing maybe twelve hours a month, spread between ushering, the kiosk, the box office and, most often in recent times, helping at the weddings the cinema holds (it has a licence). Ninety years old, the Little was long independent but is now a Picturehouse cinema, which comes under the Cineworld umbrella, so it is now closed for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever. This is incredibly sad; in fact, it’s a minor tragedy for many, many people.

The first such tragedy is for the staff, and I don’t count myself as deserving sympathy because I have another job, but I feel for my ex-colleagues for whom it’s their only one. They were put on furlough in March and some returned in July, believing that the worst was over, only to now be punched in the teeth by the closure. The reason many of the nation’s cinemas are shutting is because of the government’s failed strategy so far, its fear mongering, local lockdowns, curfews and other rules and regulations that ensure few people journey to the cinema. I myself haven’t worked at the Little since February (but I have received hundreds of pounds from future taxpayers as part of my ‘furlough’), although myself and a friend did sit outside it one evening in early August in The Grapes pub’s new outdoor area in front of the cinema, and I witnessed the staff, masked up worse than Hannibal Lecter, diligently going about their duties, doing their bit, mild desperation and ultimately forlorn hope evident in their body language, unaware of the government’s horrible September rules to soon come to plunge them into unemployment.

(I am aware that Cineworld has also closed cinemas in the US but, again, this is because of the lockdown mania of certain States - mostly Democrat-run ones - that have dampened appetites for movie theatre visits. I am also aware that few major films are actually being released, but this is a result of the vicious cycle we are in, because of the OTT reaction to this virus. I am also aware that the UK and US cinema markets are particularly reliant on US blockbusters, which is not the case in countries like France, Russia and South Korea. Lockdown is still the main foe here, though.)

The tragedy for the city of Bath, which will be replicated across the country, is that it deprives so many people of the pleasures of their local cinema. As I came to see during my time at the Little, the place was a hub for the elderly and the lonely, and its closure will be sorely felt by many in a way unimaginable to the pen pushers and rule makers in Whitehall. ‘Silver Screen’ offered pensioners a cut-price flick with tea and biscuits thrown in; ‘Big Scream’ allowed mothers with babies to watch a film with their little miracles on their laps; ’Toddler Time’ had parents giving their toddlers their first big screen experience, perhaps Rastamouse or Tractor Ted; ‘Kids Club’ on Saturday morning inexpensively offered movies for children only - no adults without children allowed! - and were often packed out, with the staff putting on activities for the kids before the film started; there were even special dog-friendly shows, usually for films with an animal theme, like Isle Of Dogs or Pick Of The Litter, where (mostly) obedient canines laid at their owners’ feet while the movie played.

In short, the Little Theatre was a place for all the community, for all ages, for everyone to meet and share in so much more than just seeing a film.

What an experience that could be, though. One of my favourite things was watching people after they came out of the auditorium just after the film finished: they usually looked dazed in a rather wonderful way, their minds processing whatever emotion the movie had given them. Whether they’d just watched a moving drama, a thriller with a bang at the end or a raucous comedy, their faces became windows into their soul, and they emerged, blinking into the light, reluctantly zoning back into the mundane reality that they had escaped from for a couple of hours. They might then comment, “Ooh, it’s got dark” or “Look at the weather - it was dry when we came in!” Most people enjoyed most of the films they saw. You’d go into the auditorium to clean up and there might be a few punters still sat there, not wanting to leave, still entranced by that silver screen, wishing to squeeze the last drop out of the experience by watching the credits to the very end. Cleaning up would involve binning boxes of popcorn and empty bottles of beer, or perhaps some sneaked-in M&S sandwiches, all evidence of the pleasurable escapism that had been had.

The enjoyment and gratefulness of individual customers was what made the job worthwhile (a job I didn’t have to do, but did purely because I liked it). Just giving instructions to a tourist popping in to ask how to get to the Roman Baths, and then being thanked for doing so, gave me a fillip.

Interactions with individual customers could be memorable. At the end of A Bigger Splash (2015) two elderly ladies giggled among themselves, then saw me - “You’ll like it,” one of them said, “there’s a lot of nudity in it!” We had a lovely lady in her late eighties, deaf as a post, who used to come regularly on the bus all the way from Bristol. She came out of a screening of the 2018 Yellow Submarine re-release, fixed me with a gaze, and blared: “THAT WAS WEIRD.” I remember the very first screening on the very first day of Fifty Shades Of Grey (2015), when a sweet old gentleman pensioner shuffled in and quietly took his seat in the middle of the auditorium. Not every customer was sweet of course - a few were nightmares! - but even when things went badly, there was the sense of shared experience that so many of us are now missing from our lives. I remember a packed Sunday evening screening for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), me ushering the crowd upstairs saying things like “You’re going to love it. Very strong violence and language - what more could you want on a Sunday evening? Enjoy!” And then there was a technical fault and the film didn’t play. So I shamefacedly hid as the discontented punters filed back down the stairs, queuing up for refunds or credit. So embarrassing.

It’s the individual regular customers you remember most: the elderly lady who came in, literally bent double, clutching her stick, shakily navigating the steps; the raven-haired middle-aged lady in the red dress who always came alone to National Opera performances, who I always imagined had her greatest happiness in life when she sat in her Little seat; the couple who always rushed in at the last second for performances and usually gave us their home-made honey drink; once I even served a cup of tea to a member of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet, former Northern Ireland secretary Tom King. All life was there.

I could tell a hundred other stories of the snippets of human contact with strangers and those who became friends through the Little, contact that is so valuable and gives tang to life. Just a few words exchanged can lift the mood, can take one outside of the suffocating confines of the mind. Thanks to the government’s deliberate disembowelment of the arts, entertainment, sport and hospitality industries, billions of small moments of the temporary lightening of the weight of existence have been extinguished. We are being robbed of future memories, we are not meeting people we might have met, we are not falling in love with people we might have fallen in love with. What is the point in living when living loses its colour and its vibrance and its elan? A few people might have been given a few more months to live because of lockdown policies, but even that is highly doubtful. (And many others, cancer sufferers for example, will definitely die earlier than they would have done.)

Yes, James Bond has shown cowardice in not finding the time to die in November, setting this disaster in full motion, but it is the politicians and technocrats who have created the conditions for his withdrawal, not just by cowardice but by being dishonest, incompetent and cruel, and we should direct our fury at them. The closure of the Little Theatre cinema in Bath is just one small casualty of Boris Johnson’s mad, unwinnable war against a virus, but its closure makes us all much worse off.

NB Another of my part-time jobs was volunteer work for Bath City FC, running the club shop on match days. Now THAT was truly all about community. And it’s another bit of the good life that has been wrecked by government policies - the future of the National League hangs in the balance. This is a blog post for another day.