The Saturday Morning Matinee

A Memory of Felling.

THE SATURDAY MORNING MATINEE
Of course you remember it ... well most of us do!!!
It all seems so long ago now! but it's beginning to drift up from the fog of 'times gone by'. Hot and damp and steaming gently in the heat of the old Globe cinema at Gosforth (you sold more drinks and ice cream if you kept it very hot!) from the rain sitting there with our knees under chins and feet on the seat with sweaters pulled up to our eyes and pulled down over our knees so we looked like rows of strange beasts, so God help the ice cream girls! There must be about 1000 screaming children rooting for Roy Rogers and Trigger and hell bent on making as much noise as possible! But they never noticed that Roy's hat never fell off in a fight and that he had more lipstick on than Dale Evans his love interest. They would never imagine that poor old Trigger would end up being stuffed and mounted on a plinth outside Roy's ranch.
Hands up if you remember The Perils of Pauline and you must remember Flash Gordon and the Clay Men! , then there was Zorro !, now there was a force to be reckoned with! We all wanted to be Zorro! After the show there we were galloping up the road on imaginary horses with our navy blue school raincoats over our shoulders buttoned at the neck so it looked like Zorro's cloak, with home made eye masks covering most of our faces, brandishing our home made swords with bits of chalk tied to the tip, zizz zizz at any stray dog or any imaginary enemy who came across our path! We left Zorro's mark Z on any door or wall we passed! Zizz zizz and the deed was done and off we went to find another enemy to fight!
I suppose we could all go on for a very long time rekindling our childhood memories of the Saturday matinees we lived for, as in many cases the highlight of our week. So how strange that many years later I found myself the manager of a little cine variety hall in Felling near Gateshead and yes you guessed it! I ran a matinee for the kids, but! they nearly pulled the place apart! Why? Because I was showing the same films that I used to watch when I was small, I had not understood that times had moved on, we did not have TV in my young days and now there was so much more in ways of entertaining and filling their time that it must have been boring for them. So we hit on the idea of showing nothing but 10 cartoons and it worked! 3 minutes of cartoon then cheering and hooting for the next one!
When the twist came out with Chubby Checker's Twisting the Night Away, I decided to run a little competition each week, six kids up on the stage in a line with me standing behind doing the patter and introductions, signal to the projectionist to play the music and off they went, twisting away like little good uns! Then stop the music and I would go along behind them and put my hand on each head and the one that got the loudest applause was the winner, and he got two free seats to next week's matinee and a box of sweets and off they went and back to the cartoons ...
OK! All went well untill I noticed that one little lad wearing an open duffle coat and Wellingtons was the winner for six weeks on the trot! Then I noticed that all the usherettes were hanging off a radiator at the back of the stalls killing themselves laughing with tears streaming down their faces at the antics on the stage, so when it was all over I went up to them and asked what they were laughing at and one of them said "Eeee Mister don't you know? The little lad in the duffle coat has his willy out!! And the kids love him!! So that was the end of that idea! But I did go on to greater things ...

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