Bournemouth 200 - Time For The Renaissance?
Bournemouth Tourism has been sending out emails announcing “The Bournemouth bicentenery [sic] is now in full swing." The main events are still to come, as the official calendar [downloadable PDF] of events online shows. These are an official town history by local historians out in early May (from Dovecote Press in Wimborne) and a substantial archival website, a “virtual museum” called Streets Of Bournemouth, going online in late June (courtesy of a £440K HLF grant). These will have a shelf life longer than the beach parties and other such events also planned. With the Crunch, public anger over political corruption, the IMAX, surf reef , and how the the town has been turned into ‘the British Ibiza’ (with a nightclub economy that turns the downtown core into a giant crime scene of public drunkenness and drug-taking), the Bicentenary might include some sober reflection on the future. Especially with electoral uncertainty now in prospect, it might be a good time to decide what kind of town Bournemouth wants to be in the future in terms of quality of life. That is, one with a more creative, bohemian future, rather than the present one of predominant philistinism.
In terms of current development issues, the Echo reports [3-Ap-10], regarding the public consultation on what to do with the IMAX building [result announced in June], that Council emails obtained via the FOI Act suggest they already favour turning it into ‘a Wave House indoor surfing centre,’ rather than an arts-entertainment complex etc. (This option would of course make up for their unpopular closure of the swimming pool at the BIC to make more space for political conferences etc, as well supplanting the under-performing undersea artificial surf reef.) The plan to turn part of the Pavilion Gardens site into a casino site in exchange for restoring the old ballroom etc has now also resurfaced [Echo 3-Ap-10]. This caused controversy when it came out the deal was signed on local election day itself, on behalf of the outgoing administration. Now, after 2 years of property negotiations over ‘a complicated land swap agreement’ with the Meyrick Estate, the casino plan is, so to speak, on the cards again. However, the public-poll winner was a 'tropical' garden, an idea that goes back to Victorian times.The ‘water-park' proposal came second, so as in the current election, nothing is really settled yet. (A water-slide would obviously make more money than a garden.)
The standard argument for putting tourists before residents is that the town has a tourist economy, and that the old bucket-and-spade days are gone, but this is a red herring. The ‘bucket-and-spade’ era dates back to the heyday of bank-holiday day trippers starting in the 1870s-80s and began to die off when cheap airline flights to sunnier resorts became available in the 1970-80s. And the ‘town-now-shedding-its-bathchair image’ cliché so beloved of young journalists, to suggest the town was run for the benefit of the elderly (usually referred to dismissively as “the blue rinse brigade”), was always misleading. This alleged focus has come to the fore again locally since MoreBus withdrew its Airshow 2010 [19-22 Aug] sponsorship in protest over pensioners getting ‘free’ rides - meaning the company wasn’t compensated enough for this national scheme (which has now been bureacratically modified to restrict eligibility). In earlier centuries, most of the premature deaths from disease were due to childhood illnesses (hence the drive for large families); the occupant of a bathchair was just as likely to be a child with TB or polio or a hundred other then-incurable diseases. Similarly, the adults who came here for health reasons were probably not old people as we think of them today, as life expectancy was short if you fell ill in pre-pencillin days. For instance, the artist Aubrey Beardsley, to whom there is a plaque just off the Square commemorating his stay here, was only 25 when he died of TB. (Dr Andrew Norman’s recent bicentenary book on the town’s founding as a spa explains nobody then knew TB was contagious, and was certainly no respecter of age.)
Since the bucket-n-spade heyday, Bournemouth has more of a balanced, mixed economy, becoming a financial centre etc, and even tourism itself developed a new mainstay. One type of tourist the town successfully specialised in was the language-school student, here to learn basic English. Gerald Durrell once wrote a short story on how he returned to Bournemouth in the 1960s to find it starting to change with the presence of foreign students. Since then, certain Councillors’ attempts to block Continental style pavement cafes (on the grounds young women in short skirts would cause traffic accidents) have also passed into history. While you can’t do a foreign-language degree here (Bmth U dismantled their language department as unprofitable), the town’s foreign-student language school sector has brought in millions from students here to learn English. Unfortunately, this market is now in decline due to a zealous new ad hoc Whitehall agency which sees these schools as hotbeds of illegal immigration and terrorism (they’ve even closed down state-run language schools without warning). Their new regulations state visa applicants must already know English to a GCSE level to apply, thus cleverly destroying the market’s raison d’etre. (One can surmise MI5 complained they had too many ‘potential terrorist’ targets to realistically keep an eye on, and this was the answer: restrict the market to a select few here to learn business English.) With the Council's last Big Idea, the notion the town can be a surfing centre, now exposed as one more wishful dream (the town is after all in a sheltered bay), it’s necessary to think again.

A 19th-C. allegorical map of 'Bohemia' (home of artisan ethnic-European minorities), next to the 'Great Philistine Desert' – land of those more keen on commerce than culture. On this Pilgrim's-Progress style map (courtesy of Wikipedia), you can also see the Sea of Dreams, the Land Of Youth [in French, Pays de la Jeunesse], Licentia, Vanitas, and the City of Slums. The question is, where does Bournemouth - often called a cultural desert - want to be located in the future?

Last month [31-Mr-10], the Editor-at-Large of Country Life magazine, Clive Aslet, wrote an op-ed piece for the Telegraph subtitled ‘Art And Education Are The Keys To A Renaissance For Our Coastal Towns’. He argued the key to urban regeneration is not the route taken by Blackpool, who were given £40 million in regeneration funding by gov't and decided to spend it on ‘attracting big-name "brands" like Madame Tussauds and Legoland’. Instead, Aslet cites the example of Folkestone, whose Old Town is now being redeveloped with private funding into a an artist's colony, on the premise that ‘arty types create a buzz, which attracts would-be arty, and definitely better-off, individuals from the professions. Middle-class money and commitment then transform the area to which they have come.’ This is a phenomenon well known in North America since the 1980s: a rundown downtown area is redeveloped, with old warehouses bought up cheaply and renovated as artists’ studios, architects’ offices and the like, accompanied by a new swathe of fashionable eateries and clubs. And it’s not a brand new idea for English seaside regeneration, with precedents elsewhere. A 2008 Telegraph article, “Greetings from the new British seaside,” listed examples:

The article refers to the “ripple effect” of creating a cultural ambience, a suitable metaphor here for thinking beyond the dream of a ‘surfer wave’.
At the same time, an op-ed piece by the managing director of the France Tourism Development Agency, argues, “You have to make a decision with tourism about the kind of clientele you want: either you attract people with money or people with tattoos. You cannot do both.” (Times March 27-Mr-10, “Most French visitors would only visit British coastal towns by mistake") Something of this view was perhaps reflected by the Council when it presented its £330+m Bournemouth town-centre Master Vision [sic], its plan to “transform the town centre over 20 years, mostly through building on council land in partnership with a developer.” The Echo’s headline [2-Mr-10] was “Bournemouth shouldn’t become like Blackpool.” (This ‘Master Vision’ presumably supplants the £55m scheme, now defunct [Echo 12-Jan-10, “Ambitious £55 million Bournemouth scheme 'dead in the water' ”] after a decade of planning, to build 17 restaurants and a new multiplex cinema on the NCP car park where the bus station once stood, in Exeter Rd.) There was also a proposal in 2008 for an “arts Czar” to cut through local bureacracy and help establish a ‘cultural quarter.’ [Echo 26-May-08, 'Cultural quarter' could boost town']
Of course, most of the money curently being spent on bringing visitors to Britain is being spent on the 2012 Olympics, which will also take place here as well as London, due to the marine events. (These will be held at Weymouth and Portland, with sailing training facilities also at Christchurch.) However the Olympics includes a component called the Cultural Olympiad. Nobody can use this as a label for their cultural event beyond the official IOC hierarchy (who are so zealous they’ve even trademarked the name of the year, and classed any use of these words by other Councils etc as “ambush marketing” supposedly actionable in court). Nevertheless, there is nothing to stop local cultural events from happening independently. In 2012, the town will be chock-a-block with visitors, including many journalists, and would be a good time to push for a more cultural profile. Any events-umbrella label must not refer to any trademarked Olympics keyword, but can be a “Fringe” in concept.
One initiative flourishing nationally is literary festivals (yes, I know, it’s surprising – see this article for explanation). We already have a literary festival in Bournemouth [Oct 22-28, this year’s theme being Freedom, Books & Imagination] and now we also have a Poole Literary Festival [Oct 29–31]. These do not compete, but are scheduled so one neatly dovetails in right behind the other, so any literary-minded visitors who might want to attend events at both can do so. And these are both hands-on events with workshop participation (not just sitting listening to famous author promote latest book), which will help develop new writers. Predictably, neither of these are listed in the Council's downloadable official 2010 events calendar 56pp PDF, which covers up to the end of October. The only items listed for the climactic final week of Bicentenary are a Girl Guides pledge-renewal meeting and a Hallowe’en event for kids. There is also an independent/ student film festival at the Pier Theatre on Saturday May 8th [postponed from 24 April], also not officially listed. The town’s own official annual arts festival, which had a false start in the early 90s, is supposedly being relaunched this year [Echo 6-Nov-08, "Town’s arts festival is set for comeback" ] via a “newly-formed arts and culture board”, the hope being to create “a nationally recognised festival” rivalling those in Brighton and Salisbury. No sign of it yet, but I suppose we can always hope.

IMAX Redux? Bournemouth is in the national press again over the long-running IMAX debacle, which has been in the headlines for at least ten years now for one reason or another. Right after Council leaders rushed through a surprise vote to buy and largely demolish the Waterfront building as a view-obstructing seafront eyesore, IMAX leaseholders the US/Ireland based Sheridan Group announced they were re-opening it, perhaps as early as Easter, to exploit the new market demonstrated by James Cameron's Avatar, which is being shown at some theatres in 3-D IMAX.

A properly run IMAX presentation is indeed a sight to behold, and there were great hopes for the IMAX when it was announced in the late 90s. There was even talk it might show a local-interest film promoting the area's scenic and heritage attractions. In the event, this did not happen. (They even declined a local request to show the Jane Goodall IMAX wildlife documentary, which would've been local-interest - and hence locally promoted - as Dr G has a family home in Bmth and has links to the Bovington chimp sanctuary). It opened in 2002 after an unexplained 2-year delay. In Feb 2001, I did an item on it on the media-column page I wrote for a now-defunct community website, called Bournemouth In The Media, titled "IMAX Undead!":

The UCI idea came to naught. Instead, the IMAX showed the usual mix of 2-D short films then available (science, nature, and travelogue-style featurettes), for about a year, then cut back its off-season programme, laid off most of the staff, and finally closed down for 'refurbishment' in spring 2005, promising to reopen, though refusing to say when. It never did, and eventually the expensive IMAX projectors were removed and returned to IMAX [a Canadian company]. It only ran a full regular programme for a year or so of its 10-year existence (and 150-year lease). Sheridan now say they proposed to the Council that the building be repurposed, as an indoor surf centre, with giant artificial waves for families to frolic in. (Bit of irony there for anyone following the disappointment of the expensive surf-reef project to create a 'surfing mecca' off Boscombe Pier.) After the cinema closed, there was a campaign not to reopen it, but to demolish it as an eyesore. It even won a national award as the ugliest building in England, which probably reflects more the hostility towards the way an abandoned site was blocking the sea view that previously existed coming down Bath Road hill. As we said at the time in SCM's 2005 year-end roundup post:

The Council is now planning to compulsory-purchase it, saying Sheridan are just trying to up their CPO compensation price by suddenly announcing reopening it. (Sheridan have now said they will sell if the "price is right.") The Council are suggesting creating "a new facility which can accommodate leisure, arts, culture and entertainment attractions for the public to enjoy whatever the weather." (Sounds a bit like an arts centre, which some of us campaigned for, pre-IMAX; this is as ever unlikely to occur, but at least they're not talking casino, which is what some cynics have been saying it would always end up as.) To add to the fuss, apparently there's also to be an enquiry at the way Councillors were ambushed over the off-agenda rush vote, without any discussion allowed, on the decision to put up £7.5 m to buy and demolish the place (which seems to be owned for some reason by a Northern Ireland civil servants' pension fund, and contains a few other attractions run by other leaseholders).

The problem with the IMAX cinema's local presentations was they were largely non-IMAX, padded out with a tiresome lot of din and advertising tackiness, to make the shows over twice as long. First, to demo the enormous speaker system IMAX theatres require, there would be up to half an hour of rock music, playing to a near-empty cinema at over 100dB, as if the place was a dance club. When management realised nobody else was coming, they would send in a young staffer with a mike to do a standup spiel about the IMAX process, including demos highlighting one after another of its thunderous speakers, like a sort of sound test. Then there would be an interval, then some non-IMAX, poor-quality trailers and adverts. Finally, mercifully, the 70mm IMAX film itself would be shown, and one could almost forget the infuriating preamble – almost but not quite. The actual films would run under an hour, often closer to half an hour, then you were back out on the street to the accompaniment of more hard-rock music blaring away.The actual programme of films was not well advertised either, so you hard to search to find out when the film was being changed, and for what. The process was evidently regarded as more important than the choice of film, some of the films being shown being quote old (I saw one there actually made in the 80s.) I’ve seen IMAX films in various venues since the 80s, and no other IMAX presentations I’ve sat through have been as annoying as this. And despite Sheridan‘s suggestion the local IMAX was simply 5 years ahead of its time, and that it will have a new lease on life now 3-D features are here, 3-D IMAX itself is nothing new; I saw it showcased at Expo 86. It was in fact the local cinema’s trouble setting up for 3-D projection that led to its final closure in 2005.

What Sheridan was suggesting of course is that full-length CGI-enhanced drama features like Avatar will make the difference, allow an IMAX redux. But Avatar, though now a runaway hit, took at least $237 million and over a decade to complete, so the inevitable market followups will not be available for years. Also, the booking fees are obviously going to be a lot higher than for standard IMAX fare (documentary featurettes or potted versions of features like Apollo 13), so ticket prices will be well up. While a longer running time means there is no need for padding the programme lengthwise, cinemas in Britain (unlike in North America) insist on adverts, promos and ice-cream intervals as an essential source of revenue, and have them even with a 2-hour plus film. (Avatar is 165 mins, which will make for a very long evening if it gets here.) None of the IMAX films I’ve seen over several decades were preceded by a nearly an hour of non-IMAX assaults on the senses. The result elsewhere was that people would pay over and over to see this same IMAX film, which would run for weeks or even months, in the manner of the 70mm Cinerama films that were IMAX's predecessor. (These, like mainstream-cinema 'roadshow' presentations, came with an overture, an interval with entr’acte music, and exit ‘playout’ music all by the film’s composer – and nothing else). With the Bournemouth IMAX's loud and tacky add-ons for padding, nobody I met would ever go back, no matter what the film.

See The Pulp Film Adaptation, Read the Better Book Dept: The new BBC HD screen version of The Day of the Triffids shown over New Year’s and just out on DVD has marginal local interest in itself (it abandons most of the novel’s local settings), but it does draw attention to the more thoughtful novel. John Wyndham’s 1951 classic has not dated as badly as some Cold War era SF novels, and on screen easily takes on a contemporary day-after-tomorrow setting. Due to its influence, a whole cycle of novels and films have followed in its wake where after some eco-cataclysm (asteroid, flu pandemic etc) a small band of survivors (sound familiar?) struggle with different approaches to basic societal organisation. (There’s even a sequel done after Wyndham’s death, The Night Of The Triffids by Simon Clark.) The new 2 x90 min high-def screen version is said to be the 8th BBC production of the story if you include 4 radio versions – though I only know of one previous BBC TV adaptation, a 6 x 30 min one (164 mins on DVD) in 1981 [fan page here] which had klutzy pre-CGI special effects, but was a more faithful, less melodramatic adaptation. There was also a 1962 feature-film version famous among SF buffs as a botched, incomplete adaptation. (It ran out of money halfway and a new lighthouse sequence tacked on to an hour’s footage already shot in France.) It seems as much inspired by Wells’s War Of The Worlds as Wyndham’s novel, the triffids made almost the size of Wells’s Martian ‘tripods.’

In the novel, the Earth passes through the tail of a comet [perhaps triggering the release of gamma rays from new satellite weapons], blinding almost everyone. The country is soon overrun by ambulatory, carnivorous and poisonous 3-legged jungle plants called triffids which had been bred and genetically improved to help cope with the postwar food shortage (the novel was written when food rationing was still on). The narrator Bill, a triffid expert, escapes a plague-ridden London for a commune near Devizes, and then heads down to the coast at Beaminster, crossing over to the Sussex Downs in pursuit of Jo, whom he met in London, their family group finally escaping to join a colony on a triffid-free Isle of Wight when a new regional military government appears.

The current HD film version, scripted by LA-based British writer Patrick Harbinson ('ER' etc), keeps the idea of Wight as a final safe refuge, but much of the rest is changed. For a start, there's no plague or disease - no doubt as it would seem to be ripping off BBC's Survivors, rather than vice versa. Here, the triffids are being farmed for their oil, which is somehow saving the world from global warming, and are set free by an animal rights activist. The script adds a Scottish father-son conflict revolving around repeated flashbacks of the mother being killed by triffids in the jungle; it turns heroine Jo into an unwitting collaborator, and turns the women's commune into a sinister religious setup [shot at Winchester’s Holy Cross abbey] complete with human sacrifice.

It creates an overarching villain [Eddie Izzard], a psychopathic ne'er-do-well who takes over No 10, even though there's a functioning remnant of govt. Unblinded due to the fact his baseball cap shielded him from the deadly cosmic gamma rays [!], he survives his airliner crashing onto London by wrapping himself in lifevests. Stealing a shop-dummy tailor’s blazer, he adopts a new identity (like 'Sawyer' in Lost), and becomes head of a paramilitary gang that takes over London. When that falls apart, he somehow turns up with his henchmen at Bill and Jo’s remote fortified farm (just walks in), threatening to shoot them unless they can work out how to kill the tens of thousands of triffids, by the next morning. Luckily, Bill has learned that the triffids are intelligent and respond to calls that can be mimicked (like the raptors in JP-III), and all ends happily.
There doesn’t seem to be a film tiein paperback new edition of the novel, but it is widely reprinted, being part of the SW public libraries’ 2004 Great Reading Adventure which used the 2001 Penguin Modern Classics edition, which was reissued in 2008.