Prelude

Before I started work at Derann, Derek invited me along to watch one of the film shows Derann Film Services regularly put on at various local workingmen’s clubs, and this is where I met John(ny) Thompson. John worked as a TV engineer for one of the big TV rental companies, a first rate electrician and great company, and he too would join Derann just a few years later as head of our very busy AV repairs department. However on this first meeting he and Derek, using two 16mm projectors, had shown ‘Dracula’ with Christopher Lee, a great introduction to the film shows and the first of many. From that point on I would spend a lot of time at the shop, at 171 Stourbridge Road in Holly Hall, not gossiping or watching films, but being shown how to rewind and check the 8mm & 16mm that had been returned from hire or the procedure to make up rental catalogues and then being put to work to collate  a  hundred or so. I was able to see at first hand many of the day to day  routines and behind the scenes was just as exciting, if not more so, than the finished product for sale in the shop. After a period of around 5 or 6 months Derek asked if I would be interested in accompanying him on one of his business trips to London, and was lucky enough to get a day off work from the Talbot’s hot and bust kitchen. So starting at 5.30am, I spent the day visiting one film distributor after another, sitting in each of the often untidy and cluttered offices, with files, posters, stills and in many cases 16mm transit cases piled on every available surface and I took it all in, even the air smelled different in thost cramped and cosy offices. It was a fantastic day out, and better still, I was away from the unpleasant atmosphere of the Talbot. I’ve had many years since to try and fathom out why he asked me along and can only assume that perhaps he was weighing me up before he sprung the job offer. Meanwhile at the shop I was given free reign to Derann’s film libraries and this gave me the opportunity to see many 40’s & 50’s films I’d not seen, and I never left the shop empty handed. ‘The Monster Maker’, ‘First Man In Space’, ‘The Devil Bat’, ‘The Lost Continent’ and ‘Unknown World’ were just a few of the titles I watched in my room back at the Talbot Hotel. I was also given the use an old 16mm projector so that I could feast myself on films like ‘Journey to the Seventh Planet’, ‘Psychomania’ and ‘The Spectre of Edgar Allen Poe’. But non of this prepared me for that employment offer and I was  gob-smacked when Derek had asked if I would be interested in joining the staff at Derann, in a permenant job!