Chris Upton: Birmingham a Mecca of Odeon silver screens
Apr 9 2010 By Chris Upton
To keep yourself on your toes, they say, you should always be trying something new. So last week I did exactly that. I went to a bingo club. I can’t tell you that I made a fortune or that I lost one; I didn’t actually play.
The hall in question is in Kingstanding. Mecca, I think it was, or it might have been Gala. It was Saturday morning – the time “breakfast bingo” – and the tables were already busy.
The manager told me they get around 2,100 players a week. Live bingo may no longer have the world domination it seemed to enjoy in the 1960s, but it has clearly not gone way.
But it has evidently moved on. No longer is there a cheeky chap at the front, plucking balls out of a tub and giving them those familiar names: legs eleven, key to the door, two fat ladies. It is no longer, I assume, permissible to refer to women’s legs or their weight, and door keys are now issued at any age.
Instead, therefore, there are digital read-outs and large numbers, orange and anonymous, flashed across the screen. It looked efficient, but impersonal.
The reason for being there was not some social investigation of working-class pastimes. Gala Bingo occupies one of the early Odeon cinemas, and I had in tow 50 more people interested in Odeons. Most of them, like me, had never bingo-ed in their life.
All the Odeons which Oscar Deutsch built in Birmingham are still standing. The one at Perry Barr is now a banqueting suite and unrecognisable, even from the outside. One still operates as a cinema at Sutton Coldfield and Kingstanding (opened in 1935) is the third.
Ironically, the picture house turned bingo hall is by far the best preserved. It’s not simply that the Odeon Kingstanding is listed, but its conversion from pictures to numbered balls did not change it utterly. Standing at the back, you can still imagine how it felt to be one of 1,300 people watching Bogart and Bacall.
The demands of the multiplex, however, have changed the Sutton Odeon utterly. All those false floors and multi-screens have swallowed up and erased the old picture house. Only the old projection room, standing aloof from the digital revolution, remains unaltered.Which of the two gets a full house, we didn’t stay long enough to find out.
* Dr Chris Upton is eating popcorn at Newman University College in Birmingham
