Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

IF YOU believed the film industry hype whenever the latest "record-breaking" blockbuster was billed, you would think Cinema queues were at their longest ever.

But even with the revival that multi-screen outlets and mega-productions like ET and Jurassic Park have inspired in recent years, the flicks in East Lancashire would have to put tens of thousands more backsides on seats every week to catch up with its cinema-going heyday.

For now our region has just three cinemas - though only one, Clitheroe's venerable Civic Hall gem, continues with a single screen - whereas once it had scores.

Indeed, at the pinnacle of its picture palace past, Blackburn alone had just short of 20,500 cinema seats.

With two showings nightly and matines, that number can conservatively be multiplied by 10 for an idea of how many used to go to the flicks each week before TV in the '50s turned audiences into stay-at-homes.

But how many cinemas did the town have at its picture-going peak?

That was a question that flared in a friendly argument among lunchtime regulars last week around the bar at Blackburn Golf Club - and this column was called on to adjudicate on ex-captain and local history buff Ray Smith's answer of 15 when all the rest said it was one fewer. Ray's right. For, he included the old Grand, the town's last home of "live" theatre, which fell silent in 1956. For a brief spell in the early '30s, from 1931-34, it put on films instead of variety and plays.

Actually, Blackburn might have had even more cinemas had a £70,000 plan by Union Cinemas in 1936 to build the town's biggest, the 2,000-seater Ritz, in Ainsworth Street not been abandoned. It would have topped the now-vanished, but then largest, 1,830-seat Rialto (later the Odeon), which opened in 1931 in Penny Street for a 43-year run.

In fact, the town did eventually get a Ritz Cinema but only via a name change - when, five years before its closure in January, 1958, the far-less-grand King's Hall in Bank Top changed its title.

Another super cinema Blackburn never got was the 1,630-seat Princess Picture Palace, for which a Liverpool syndicate applied for a licence in 1929 before dropping the scheme to build in Audley Lane.

What killed the super-Ritz scheme may have been the scheme, completed in 1938, for the revamp of the nearby old Theatre Royal whose ancestry went back to 1816 - though there had been a theatre on or near the site since at least 1787. Cinema ended its era as a playhouse in 1931, but the subsequent complete re-build gave film fans luxury rivalling the Rialto's. Not only were there 1,600 seats that were the "last word in comfort," or the thick Balkan carpet on the floor, but innovations like earphones in the stalls and balcony for the hard-of-hearing and an up-market caf accommodating 200 people, some in alcoves that afforded "delightful privacy." A similarly select caf was also a feature of Burnley's town-centre Savoy Cinema, which had introduced the new wonder of talking pictures to the town in 1929, the same year that the Bolton Road picture house of the same name had screened the first "talkie" in Blackburn.

A 1908 playbill from Blackburn's Exchange Hall - still going today as the Apollo 5 Cinema - boasting Sydney Carter's New Century Picture Company's "new series of talking and singing pictures" - may cast doubt on the date the talkies arrived in town, but not much.

For although the newspapers gave reviews of the films, there was not a mention of "sound".

But, in that era, East Lancashire could claim some cinematic "firsts." Colne's Central Hall, opened in 1907, was the very first purpose-built cinema in Britain. It closed in 1922 but cinema soldiered on in the town until 1964 when the Hippodrome showed its last reel.

Blackburn's still-standing Alexandra Hall, in Dock Street, went one better, claiming in its advertisements for years to be the "first picture house in the world." But "Penks," as it was known after its owner Frederick Pendleton's nickname, actually opened in 1909, not 1906 as was claimed. Yet if these were among the picture house pioneers, it was not long before they were caught up all over East Lancashire. Burnley once boasted as many as 17 cinemas and even smaller towns had at least one.

Even after the last war, Nelson still had six and Darwen had five until the curtain came down on its last in 1971.

In Accrington, Church, Oswaldtwistle and Clayton-le-Moors there were a dozen cinemas to choose from but by 1962, when the Empire in Accrington town centre switched to bingo, becoming the ninth in the area to cease with films in 12 years, there were just two left.

Even the little village of Brinscall boasted its own flicks, the Regal. Known locally as the "Itch and Scratch", it showed its last film in 1957 and was demolished in 1970.

But for half a century the magic of cinema captivated millions in the long-gone, but warmly remembered picture palaces of the region - such as the Grand at Nelson; the Regal at Bacup; the Grand at Rawtenstall, where films were projected on to the back of the screen; the Albert Hall in Darwen, which had a seven-piece orchestra in the era of the "silents;" and the Palladium in Mill Hill, Blackburn.

Perhaps the most fondly-recalled cinema experience of all was the children's matine on Saturdays - an institution now being revived by the Kids' Club at Burnley's new Hollywood Park multi-screen spot. Was there any bigger thrill than watching the latest cowboy or space-hero serial to the accompaniment of cheers and boos - such as those that echoed round the packed Star Cinema at Little Harwood in the '50s when Flash Gordon and Hopalong Cassidy episodes filled the screen and the din in the auditorium sent the proprietor, Mr Taylor, up and down the aisles, waving a teacher's cane in a futile bid to restore order? It was an era that was ended by the arrival of the mass TV audience in the mid-'50s - 1956 for instance saw 81million fewer people going to the cinema , a seven per cent fall that also hit the industry in the two previous years. The '60s fad for bingo and then the video rental boom in the '80s only served to put the boot in.

But if it was these changing social trends that demolished so many cinemas, there was another happening in East Lancashire that finished off one of its old flicks - the picture house that demolished itself.

That came in 1960 when the roof of the 700-seat Victoria Cinema at Eanam Bridge, Blackburn, fell in. The place had been shut six days earlier when the building began to subside at one corner, but the blockbuster that brought the house down turned out to be a 270-foot-deep hole found under the cellar.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.