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Memories of Bristol Cinema

The former Kings cinema Old Market Bristol BS2 (later demolished to make way for more office space)

The years after 1945 were hard for Britain. The country was in debt after the strain of war and there was a severe housing shortage. Both of these factors affected cinema business.

The Entertainment Tax, which was added to the price of a cinema ticket, was raised. It was nearly 47% on the price of an expensive seat. At this rate people could not afford to keep up the twice-a-week habit of pre-war years. Smaller audiences meant that owners had to keep putting up the prices to make any profit.

Building materials, money and labour were channelled into house-building. This meant that very little was available for building new cinemas or even repairing old ones. No new cinemas were built in Britain until 1954. Old ones became increasingly scruffy.

Slum clearance and rebuilding programmes left many inner-city cinemas without a local audience.

From August 1947 to March 1948 US film distributors boycotted Britain because the government proposed putting a high import duty on imported films. Robbed of Hollywood films, British cinemas had to fall back on old copies and poor quality films. Cinema audiences never recovered.

There were only 15,000 television sets in Britain in 1945, but by 1955, when commercial television started, there were 5 million. By 1961 there were 11 million sets and cinema admissions had fallen by 75%.

All these factors together meant that cinemas were not able to compete very well with television. Who would want to go out to a cold, draughty cinema, with decor that had not been painted or repaired since the 1930's, and pay prices that had risen much faster than inflation, when television could entertain you more cheaply in the warmth of your own fireside every night?

Filmmakers tried to fight back by taking on techniques that could not be copied on TV. 3-D films appeared, requiring the use of special projectors, screens and expensive glasses. It was a short-lasting gimmick. Cinemascope brought wide-screen 'epics' that only big cinemas could manage to show effectively. Some new cinemas were built, usually on the same lines as 1930's cinemas. Some older houses tried to catch a paying audience by showing soft porn films which could not be shown on TV.

Cinema owners were sometimes slow to see that times had changed. The chain system, in which all the cinemas in a particular company would show the same film in the same week might have saved some money in distribution costs. However, the result was that the new car-owning public, perhaps wanting a change from TV and willing to drive across town to see a film, were faced with less choice than there could have been. Only later did owners think of splitting large cinemas up into two, or even three separate, smaller cinemas, thereby offering more choice and cutting running costs.

The rise of video hire in the 1980's was a further blow to the cinema. At the lowest point, about 1985, there were less than 1,000 cinemas open in Britain.

What happened to the cinemas?

The two most common fates of old cinemas were demolition or bingo. The bingo craze started in 1961 and turning cinemas into bingo halls at least kept them more or less intact. The other fates of old cinemas are too many to list. They have become shops, carpet warehouses, chapels, bowling alleys, temples, even car showrooms.

Actress Joey King at the 2011 Teen Choice Awards held at the Gibson Amphitheatre on August 7, 2011 in Universal City, California.