Matinee Madness

I used to go to the local picture house regularly when I was young. It was a real picture house too with a rolling programme and even an old organ in the pit below the screen. I don’t know if this was ever played in the time I went there but I suspect it wouldn’t be worth employing someone to play it for the kids’ matinees that I used to attend. Both because of the cheap entry prices and the fact that most of the kids were up to their eyeballs on boiled sweets and fizzy drinks and were probably generally addled from breathing an atmosphere merrily mixing industrial pollutants with leaded petrol fumes.

There are a few cinemas that do Saturday morning matinees. I’ve taken the kids to the Macrobert cinema at Stirling University but this Saturday I took them along to the Bo’ness Hippodrome: a proper picture house like the one I used to go to but very much refurbished and without the plumes of cigarette smoke, knackered seating and disgusting sticky mess of God-knows-what underneath the row in front.  The main feature on this occasion was Epic – the latest animation from the team that did the Ice Age films although this time they actually appear to have employed script writers.

Matinees have the great advantage of being very much cheaper than the usual cinema experience. I managed to take the whole family along (two adults and three children) for a few pence over £11. Partly this is to entice younger families to start the cinema habit and partly to offset the obvious interruptions of younger members of the audience. Saturday Morning Matinees were always something of a chaotic affair. Even as a child I used to get hacked off with the antics of the more ADD members of the audience but the one thing that strikes me with a modern cinema audience is that the children (at least the younger ones) are actually remarkably well behaved. There are the occasional trips to the loo and some incessant sweetie wrapper fiddling but they are quite happy to sit and watch the film. This is just as well as there was at least 40 minutes worth of adverts and a short spoof news reel to sit through before the film started at which point there were a few kids that already had to trip off to the toilets (no doubt offsetting the cans of juice that they had been consuming for the past half hour or so.)

I’d like to take the children along to the cinema more often but I have noticed a new feature advertised at several cinemas which is the “Autism Friendly Screening”. Amongst features for this includes moderate sound volume, ambient theatre lighting and, importantly, no adverts or trailers. Whether this actually makes the viewing experience better for autistic people is a mute point (I’m assuming that they have taken advice from medical experts)  but the relaxed, no adverts, no-nonsense approach sounds fantastic to me – not so much for children with limited attention spans but more for my sanity. Maybe I’m slightly autistic on the quiet?