The magic of cinema isn’t just about film

Cinema is fading. Borat went straight to Amazon Prime, where he is smaller, and Bond 25 — no time to die eh? — is delayed until next year. In response Cineworld has ‘temporarily’ closed its cinemas and the smaller film houses are struggling. Millennials and Generation Z don’t mind, but I am no such creature: I was an usherette at Options in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1990. Do they know that cinema remains, despite its best efforts, the most inspiring kind of mass culture?

Dreams mean nothing to the gilded and interesting: they do not need them. But I, an ordinary suburban child, did need cinema, specifically Options, which is now an Odeon, showing Ooops! The Adventure Continues…

With product such as this, you could argue cinema deserves to fail. That, in some dark basement in its soul, it wants to fail.

Options was once a golden-age cinema: a Grenada that opened in 1939, the year that 990 million cinema tickets were sold in Britain and The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind played. The high point of British addiction to the cinema was seven years in the future, 1946, when 1.635 billion cinema tickets were sold and It’s a Wonderful Life was playing. The vast gallery of the original screen, which had seated 1,400 people and a Wurlitzer, was a nightclub, also called Options, and three new screens were squashed into the rest. I was only in the club in daytime — there was no daylight, ever — and, with sticky floor and smoky walls, this film-house gallery was still the most atmospheric thing I have ever seen. Perhaps Options is my Rosebud: never to be forgotten or recovered.

I wore a candy-striped waistcoat with gold buttons and learnt to serve popcorn: you must heave the sugar up from the bottom.