PORTRAITS OF FORGOTTEN DEAD CINEMA ORGANISTS

By Vic Pratt

I have always been fascinated by outmoded, obsolete forms of popular entertainment...particularly when they are based upon simpler pleasures than today's "consumers" can be bothered to tolerate. And you can't get much more obscure than the lost art of cinema organ playing. Like cathedral stonemasonry, it is forgotten. Gone. Nobody (well, virtually nobody) knows how to do it any more.

I was engaged in one of my customary charity shop rummages, in Hounslow High Street, when I happened upon a book entitled "Theatre Organ World": a kind of industry journal for the people across the nation that played music on the organ at cinemas. The book dated from 1946, already long past the heyday of such music, you would think: the talkies had long since superceded silent cinema. But in those days, you got what was called a "Full Supporting Programme" when you went to the flicks. Cartoons, cinemagazines, newsreels, short comedies, a B picture...and, if you were lucky, an organist, grinning at the audience from behind a gleaming organ...as well as the main feature. They keep all this stuff quiet nowadays and expect us to be impressed by the technical showiness of artistically bankrupt advertisements instead. The people in power have done away with a large and pleasurable part of the cinemagoing experience.

I was particularly interested by a series of photographs that formed the centre section of this tatty faded book: portraits of cinema organists, some comparatively well-known, some unknown, all resplendent in their bow ties and stiff button-down collars, the brilliantine on their hair glinting from the footlights. These were the minor celebrities of their day, the kind of people who would open fetes, hand out autographed postcards, and kiss old ladies in the street. If they were famous today, they might be making daytime television programmes.

an original work by Vic Pratt