Home away from HOME: The life and times of Cornerhouse

There’s an old joke dating back to when there was a single-screen cinema on every main road in the country: ask a man from Oldham to name three cinemas beginning with the letter T and he’ll answer “th’Odeon, th’ABC and Tatler.” Depending on how you define art it was always there, the arthouse cinema, in one form or another. 

So it was on a wet October night in 1985 that I got off the bus at Piccadilly, and wandered to the junction where Oxford Road became Oxford Street to watch a film called Insignificance, directed by Nic Roeg, in a former Tatler porno cinema.

The premise of the film sounded a bit daft to me. A fictional encounter between disparate, unnamed characters who were clearly Marilyn Monroe, Senator Joe McCarthy, Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein. Not something I would normally go and see, but Bob Greaves on Granada Reports had asked people to phone in for a free ticket, so there I was at the brand new cinema: Cornerhouse. No definitive article. Founded by the same Bob Scott whose remarkable life and career have been documented elsewhere on The Mill, it felt like no other cinema I’d ever been to before. There were no hot dogs for a start. Or Butterkist popcorn. Or Westlers burgers, a long forgotten delicacy made from meat of indeterminate origin, boiled grey-purple to within an inch of its life and slapped between a scruffy bread bun. Despite these obvious shortcomings, Cornerhouse would become a friend for the next thirty years.

Long before Cornerhouse came to be, the same premises were home to the Tatler Continental: a garish former news picture house bedecked with lurid orange banners across the front advertising “UNCENSORED ENTERTAINMENT”. The Tatler showed what was euphemistically known as ‘non mainstream’ films from the continent — mostly Scandinavia. The type of artful film that Travis Bickle would take Betsy on a date to in Taxi Driver. Customers would shuffle under the shadow of the white-tiled doorway, looking furtively over their shoulders for faces that might recognise them, making sure to bin their tickets before they got home — the only evidence of lewd conduct permanently disposed of. ‘The Dirty Mac Brigade’, we called them. Only in England would wearers of unlaundered outer rainwear publicly seeking private titillation have their own sweetly genteel collective noun.

Tatler got tired of constantly reinventing itself and so it lay unloved and unlovely from 1981 to 1985 before it caught Bob Scott’s eye. He thought that something could be made of the abandoned picture house which was once the archetype of what was known, not without some affection, as a flea pit. Then it rose again.