Ancient History
By Martin
Welcome to the history of Dr. Scott's Extra Forks. This is a history that begins before I joined the group, but I'll be telling you my side of things, with some additions from other sources to fill out any concurrent details that may not have happened in my ken!
Cast your minds back into the abyss that is the time storm of the past! (Wow with tacky prose like that I could write for BBC books! - Dr. Who in-joke!)
We are travelling back in time to 1977. It is Halloween. We are going to a local theatre in Dumfries that during the winter months also runs late night movies to help supplement the income from its play repertoire. It tended to show culty type movies like "The Song Remains The Same", "The Last Waltz" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". These were shown on Friday nights, and as an excuse to get out of the Dorms (I went to a boarding school! - I'm sure that will explain a lot to some people!) on a late pass we would say we were going to these shows.
They commonly started at 9pm finishing around 10.30pm, plenty of time for any of those who were interested - most folk - to get to the pub for drinkies and to meet up on the way home. Someone had to go to the show to be able to give the rest a brief outline of the film in case we were quizzed on it when we got in! It was usually me that went to the film! (Hey I love the movies - sue me!).
So back to Halloween '77 - the film was about this bizarre guy in ladies underwear who creates this muscleman and then gets killed by the hired help. What a dreadful movie - I HATED IT!
Lets now jump forward to September 1981, when I started university in Glasgow, and Fresher's Week (a week before the start of term proper to allow new first year/freshman students to orientate themselves round the campus and all the various facilities offered by the University and its Faculties). This includes the Unions and the Clubs and Societies. All are desperate for your patronage and they all try very hard to get you to join. They all offer Cheese and Wine parties with a movie! That year it seemed that every single one of them had got hold of a print of "THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW"!
All my new friends wanted to go to the Cheese and Wines and who was I to get in the way of this socialising. I saw the movie 4 times that week - now if that's not indoctrination, I don't know what is! Shortly after this [Editors note: this was now 1983] the film was on at our local Fleapit "THE GROSVENOR" and along I went with my new friends. This was the first time I saw the show with participation.
There was an American exchange student (I was later to find out was called Nicholas - I never met him) he did an intro to the film and lead the audience in some of the participation lines, SHOCK! HORROR! He was also dressed up as Frank and there were one or two others there in costume, mostly lab coats and underwear, but there was a Riff Raff (of whom more later!).
The Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow's "arthouse" cinema showed "ROCKY" for a whole week at Christmas 1983 (this cinema would become more influential to us during the 1990s!!!) By this time I was hooked. Richard O'Brien had me body and soul (only I didn't know that yet). It took the stage show to appear in Glasgow [1984] for the first time to finally convince me that running around in a basque and sussies was what I wanted to do on a Friday and Saturday night. That week I saw the show a few times and I also met NICKY for the first time (he had been playing the enigmatic Riff at the film screenings!).
I was there on behalf of theStudent Newspaper to review the show. As the music for the introduction of 'The Phantoms' started there was a deluge from the upper balconies that can only be described as a "paddy field" coming over, the amount of water and rice present could have fed your average city's student population for at least a week! I was under the balconies so I only really saw the waterfall! I was lucky. Interviewing Richard Kates (the actor playing Frank-N-Furter for that tour) he said that the cleaners had threatened to walk out the next day if there was the same mess, somewhat understandable!
That fateful meeting between Nicky and I lead to me joining the local Rocky Group - no name at that point and rather small (but perfectly formed - we've always been that way!). We did the rounds of the local cinemas when they deigned to show "ROCKY" - we went to 'THE KELBURNE' in Paisley [which eventually closed in 1997 and then burned down]. We did our local "Dirty Cinema" when they tried out the idea of late night cult movies and not sex features! (unfortunately that idea didn't last long!). We did a show in Bearsden, Glasgow (the Rio Cinema, now long since demolished - nothing to do with us!) where the audience sat straight faced through all of our best participation, only falling about at the "No not the Zen Room" line! We did student showings in the unions of Glasgow University and Strathclyde University. We travelled to Edinburgh and did shows in their "Dirty Cinema" until it closed down, but through all this our spiritual home was "THE GROSVENOR", in Hillhead Glasgow. It was situated right in the middle of student-land and thus made it ideal for showing "ROCKY".
Updated: 15/01/04
