Cuddington Hall Applies To Join Hollywood

A retired quantity surveyor in Cuddington has written to the global film industry to inform it that he is now part of it.

The letter went out last week from the back row of Bernard Hall, where the Village Picture House puts a film on a screen four and a half metres wide, through a 4K projector, with surround sound coming at you from places you did not agree to. Somewhere in the middle of the last one, a man called Derek Vowles concluded that he was no longer a bloke in a coat watching a film in a hall, but a studio, and that the hall was his lot, his backlot, and eventually his campus. He has laminated himself a lanyard reading TALENT, which he insists names a department rather than a person, and he has begun referring to the serving hatch as post-production.

"The screen is not the cinema," Vowles said, standing directly in front of the screen and blocking most of it. "The cinema is the seventy chairs, the bar, and the man who knows which extension lead is the long one. I have been in meetings with myself about the second half of the evening and I can tell you we are extremely close."

His expansion plan, which he keeps in a document wallet, involves renaming the car park Lot B, annexing the green for exteriors, and persuading the Oscars to be held somewhere with better parking. He has allocated himself three awards, is in negotiations with the stacking chairs over billing, and points out that the operation already carries National Theatre Live, which he describes as his theatrical division.

Pressed on what he actually does once the lights go off, Vowles said that he watches the film. He described this as the hardest and least thanked job in the building, then went quiet because the trailers had started and he does not like talking over them.

The honest bit underneath all this is that Cuddington has a cinema. It just happens to have a village hall wrapped around it, a licensed bar behind you, and nobody charging you for a drink the size of a bin. That is a better night than most of what the real industry has managed this decade, and it does not make you watch an advert about a car.

So go. The Village Picture House is showing Rebuilding (PG), Thursday 22 October, 8pm, at Bernard Hall Cuddington, doors at 7.30pm with refreshments and the bar on, and it is ticketed with about seventy seats, so get one in cash from Cuddington Stores or book online (a little extra per ticket, and online booking closes roughly two hours before).