Book Reviews
BASINGSTOKE ENTERTAINED Mervyn Gould, Mercia Cinema Society, 2007
Jeremy Buck – CTA Bulletin Jan/Feb 2008
This new publication from the Mercia Cinema Society is a comprehensive review of the theatres and cinemas in this Hampshire town. Basingstoke has never had a purpose-built theatre, live entertainment taking place in an assortment of converted premises, including the former Corn Exchange which has evolved through a period as the Union Cinemas’ Grand to become today’s Haymarket Theatre. A new concert hall, the Anvil, was opened in 1994. There have been several cinema buildings including, in the 1930s, the Waldorf, the Savoy and the Plaza, which from the pictures here appeared to be fine, modern buildings with art-deco interiors. Alas, they have all now gone and today’s cinema-goers have two multiplexes to visit, the Vue and the Odeon (a rebranded Warner). Mervyn takes us through the fascinating history of these buildings in his usual enjoyable style and there are many good pictures and also reproductions of press advertising and posters. Thoroughly recommended.
-oOo-
Reviewed by David Trevor-Jones*
A model for any prospective local cinema and theatre historian
When the reviewer was growing up near Basingstoke the Waldorf was the town’s cinema, the overspill development that was to define the town was coming and a good many villagers had never been to London. For them the town’s cinemas, dance halls and other venues were their only places of entertainment, the only ones they’d known, and so similarly was the case in the thousands of ordinary towns and villages the length and breadth of the land. The real cultural, social and architectural history of cinema, of modest theatrical receiving houses, of town halls and concert clubs is written in the humdrum ordinariness of the provincial town.
The history of cinema in many small and not so small towns has been set down for the record by local enthusiasts and amateur historians, often as not drawing on the local newspaper records. Their valuable work stands as a document of record. It freezes the past, records the dates, and if the researcher has been diligent, the names and relationships but rarely, in this reviewer’s extensive experience, in an un put-downable, riveting read. Here Gould joyously bucks the trend! The history of entertainments in Basingstoke emerges at a cracking pace, meticulously researched, fascinatingly illustrated and articulately written.
A brief thumbnail sketch of Basingstoke’s history places its entertainments into perspective. It is interesting that as a market town with a substantial hinterland of small agricultural communities it did not have an annual fair at which early bioscope might have been seen. Gould’s research tends to suggest that despite the young Jane Austen’s prancing in the Assembly Room at the Angel, Basingstoke took rather late to the idea of cinema, and even more so to theatre.
Gould’s narrative drive carries us through the emergence of local entrepreneurs, early cinema in the drill hall and corn exchange, the coalescence of the local circuit into Union and shortly after, ABC hands, the survival through all of the independent that beat the national circuit both to talkies and to ‘scope and then the gear change in entertainments more generally with the development of the town in the 1960s and near ten-fold increase in population that it brought. Successfully steering clear of the quagmires that might have trapped the less experienced writer (such as the recent “dreary saga” of the Haymarket Theatre), Gould skilfully edits quotations from local newspaper and other primary sources to tell the story. His light touch brings in asides on early sound equipment, electricity supply, Ardente deaf aids and other technical innovations to fill out the story accessibly to the general reader.
The history of theatre in the town as well as its cinemas is told with verve and authority. Minor quibbles aside, if there is any shortfall in scholarship it might be in the history of music-making in the town but The Anvil, Basingstoke’s extremely successful concert venue popular with performers and audiences alike, is fascinatingly illustrated with architect’s plans.
The biggest surprise for the cinema historian is to find that Basingstoke very nearly received a stylish, moderne building with lavish façade and foyer by the noted architect E. Norman Bailey. To prove it here are the drawings: elevations and plans, ferreted out from the Hampshire Records Office. The book would be ‘worth the price of admission’ for those alone but actually is worth it for a great deal more. Of the genre this is one of the best, a model for any prospective local cinema and theatre historian.
