The film buff who took his work home

EX-CINEMA WORKER KEEPS A FULL-SIZE
PROJECTOR IN HIS SHED

by Kerry Coupe
reproduced from the Stamford Mercury Friday 4th July 2008

His request to see inside the room was refused because he was too young. "But eventually, when I was about 15, they did allow me in to see the equipment and I was shown how everything worked. The following week, the projectionist was off sick and the manager asked me to rewind the films. It was my first taste of the real thing and I loved it. That was 1951."

Jeremy went to work at the Odeon Cinema in Peterborough as a trainee projectionist and in 1957 he became chief projectionist at the Tudor. It was a far cry from today's ten-screen multiplexes but Jeremy remembers it fondly. ''It was very basic", he said, " because they didn't have luxury seats or anything like that and it didn't sell ice creams and there was no curtain in front of the screen.

"At the front, prices were sixpence and it got cheaper the further back you sat. I don't go to the cinema often as the only local one is the Showcase in Peterborough. The only times I've been I've come out with a thumping headache because it seems everything is about special effects. People think to get the proper effect it's got to be loud but it does not."

In 1965, the Tudor introduced bingo and started showing films part time. Jeremy said: "I wasn't particularly happy with the situation so I went to work at the Allis Chalmers factory at Essendine in the export department. That was where someone said to me: 'Why don't you make a film? So I did."

Based on the Digby family who used to own the Red Hall at Bourne, Jeremy's film was entitled The House of Digby. It was one of the last films to be shown at the Tudor before it closed in 1972. Jeremy persuaded the owners to sell him the projection equipment for £50. But the loss of the Tudor, now a Chinese restaurant, was not going to stop Jeremy from bringing the world of cinema to Bourne.

He set up Bourne Film Theatre in a disused building in the Burghley Street car park, fitted with 24 seats. It started showing films in 1977 but the building, now used by Fovia, the stationers, was sold two years later and the theatre moved to a warehouse in North Street which seated 55. It showed films including ET, Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones, but closed in 1991 after the Showcase Cinema in Peterborough opened and the number of patrons slowly declined in the face of such stiff competition. The last film to play there was Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Before it closed, Jeremy started making his second film, Portrait of a Town, about Bourne which came out in 1991, in colour. It sold 2,000 copies and had 100 showings in the town. Its follow-up, Reflections of Bourne, was completed in 1997 and was shown in the Darby and Joan Hall.
Jeremy now dreams of the day when he will be able to "spruce up" the films, although he admits it's not practical to show them from his garden shed.

Jeremy has made it his aim to see every film listed in his souvenir programmes from the Tudor. The cinema published them every month and he has every one between 1947 and 1958. Many he has seen on television, but one that still eludes him is Bird of Paradise, made in 1951 starring Jeff Chandler.

Picking a favourite film is difficult, but he says Blue Lagoon with Jean Simmons and Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando are real classics while Julie Christie in the 1967 Far From The Madding Crowd would be one of his favourite actresses.

When's he's not watching films, he's tending to his garden with wife Jane. The couple have a son, Jonathan, 34.

And of his projector, he says that its only real value is sentimental. It has been promised to the Projected Picture Trust, a cinema museum at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.

"I have to keep my lawnmower in another shed," he said. "There just isn't room in this one."

NOTE: Jeremy Perkins died on Monday 29th September 2014, aged 78.

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