Brixton Astoria / Academy by Fred Romero from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0
A friend mentioned Brixton Academy to me the other day (January 2022) which immediately triggered the memory/thought:
didn’t that used to be the cinema we knew as “The Flea Pit”?
Which triggered my one clear memory of going to that cinema – although I’m sure I was taken there several times as a child. I especially remember Grandma Jenny taking me to see the film Living Free there.
Cursory research on Living Free at IMDb uncovers the UK release date as January 1972, so I am writing this memory up almost exactly 50 years after the event.
I remember the experience especially clearly, as Grandma Jenny had loved the film Born Free. She was so excited that there was a sequel to Born Free and that I was now old enough to accompany her to the flickers.
Unfortunately, Grandma Jenny’s excitement turned to disappointment, as she felt that the film Living Free was only a shadow of the wonders that she had enjoyed in the film Born Free. Grandma Jenny felt bound to let me know that the original was much better.
Frankly, I don’t think I would have discerned much difference between the two films at that age. Lions are/were exciting charismatic megafauna to see on the screen. The humans waffling on about lions and each other was comparatively dull.
Even the theme music for Living Free was cheesy and disappointing for Grandma…
…who subsequently serenaded me with the theme from Born Free, in the hope I would thus discern the relative quality of the latter theme. Unfortunately, Grandma Jenny did not share her sister-in-law Marie’s wonderful BBC Singer singing voice.
But fifty years on, the thing I remember most about the experience was my dad wanting to have me checked over for fleas for the rest of the weekend, after I had visited The Flea Pit. And dad insisted on referring to the movie as “Living Flea”.
Postscript -Memory Corrected By A Four-Year-Old: The Flea Pit Was The Ritzy, Not The Astoria
Within an hour of me posting the above piece on the Streatham, Balham & Tooting (yes, as you’ll soon see, geography was not my strongest suit at school) Memories Group on Facebook, Paula chimed in with the following remark:
I went to see Living Free in Brixton too! I always thought it was the Ritzy… but I was only 4, so what do I know
As soon as I saw that comment, I knew that she was right, a fact confirmed within minutes by Paul:
I’m pretty sure the ‘flea pit’ was the ritzy, not the odeon( as stated in the article….)
In my own defence, I know that Grandma Jenny did take me to see movies at the Brixton Astoria as well as the Ritzy back then. I have a feeling that my first “date” with Grandma was to the Astoria, but that was to see an afternoon matinee of the Sound Of Music…
…something that Grandmas everywhere did with/for their grandchildren back then, before the days when such movies were shown on the TV every bank holiday and certainly before the days that you could stream those old movies whenever you like.
I can report that Grandma Jenny’s serenading with the Sound Of Music theme sounded no better than her rendition of the Born Free theme.
But I digress.
Yes, my memory from age nine has been bested by someone who was less than half my age at the time.
Grandma Jenny and I saw Living Flea at The Ritzy.
Original uploader: Secretlondon at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 1.0