Colin Killick joining Stevenage Cine Club

Transcript:

I joined one or two things as you know, Stevenage Cine Club was one of them and also the photographic club.  Both of which, I’m pretty certain both, I know the Cine Club did, met in the canteen in Boots in the town centre  because the, they had a big, in those days they had a big photographic centre and the man who ran it was very keen on getting business and so he was quite happy to be there as a member, opening up for us, their their canteen upstairs. I joined I think it must have been shortly after I stayed in Stevenage. I heard about it and joined it. I think it must have been started probably in the late 50s because there was a film in the early 50s which I regret to say we’ve lost now because you’d have loved it of the Queen opening Queensway, the fountain and the (unintelligible) one of these things that have disappeared somewhere and we’ve no idea where it was.  We were filming then, so it was obviously started, as I say I joined it must have been at least four years later and it would’ve been working earlier than that. We hand-printed our programmes on a type setting machine, was called a Dana.   Programme of the meetings yes ‘cos we met, I think we actually met weekly we were actually that keen. We sometimes had speakers, we had a well-known – Anthony Weygans, was a fairly well-known writer for film magazines. We were making films and the only films we looked at were the ones we made, either individually or as a group. “Baby on the Lawn” they were called, because most of the time they were holiday films, somebody, mind you some were better than others.  People who’d gone abroad obviously usually got a better outlook because they’d gone to the Alps or skiing or something like that whereas if you weren’t very rich like us you would’ve ended up with just going perhaps to the seaside with your children and baby on the lawn or baby on the beach or whatever.  Some people who were richer than others managed to get the films and make their films.  The films that you saw the other day came as four minute runs, two minutes each way actually.  You got a reel which was 16mm width and you ran down one side and then you turned it over and ran down the other side. They then split it up the middle and spliced the two halves together so you got 4 minutes with a splice in the middle.

Colin Killick