This article by Eric Portman appeared in Film Forecast Volume 1, Number 2 [1948]
When I was a lad in Yorkshire, I used to dream of coming to London. Now that I am virtually a Londoner, I feel that those who were not born in the provinces have missed a lot of fun. Provincial implies many things – and not all of them bad. It means most of all almost an adoration for what we called Town.
When a play came to the Halifax Theatre, I found in it the cream of West End acting, the ultimate in West End production. Perhaps those rather debatable attributes were not to be found in the melodrama From Mill-girl to Mansion, but for me, a boy of ten, there was nothing more thrilling. I have never been more excited by a theatrical performance.
Those wild Yorkshire moors, cruel and ominous to strangers, were home to me. The trams grinding perilously up the West Riding hills bore a happier creature than the hired Rolls Royce that carries me to the studio. I think the fun springs from having experienced the best of both worlds, provincial and metropolitan; both, let's face it, parts of a rather pleasant joke if you find life amusing – as I still do.
Fish and chips on a cold night in a grimy street in Bradford have their own subtle flavour; dinner at the Savoy can be cold comfort after a sever flop of the play one believed in so thoroughly but a few days before.
Then there is the one most touching pleasure (never, thank God, spoiled by time), of going Home. Taking the train from Kings Cross is an adventure if you are going north to see the folks. How one listens for the change of voice and accent as one nears the dark, half-shrouded childhood places. The front portion for Bradford says a deep bass on the station platform. How magnificently on Sunday that same voice will be singing Why do the nations furiously rage together? in the chapel.
When I last went home, it was on an almost sacrilegious errand. I not only wanted to see places and people, but the photographer who travelled with me wanted – rather to his own surprise – to see them too. Do what you like, I said to him, but leave me alone to do the things I remember and still love.
Great fun going to my old seat in the Grand Theatre gallery again. Jolly to be dancing with the old abandon in Victoria Hall. Reg and Winnie looked just the same as when we were together in amateur opera fifteen years ago – well nearly the same
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