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