Ginger Rogers is the star—but a pigeon steals the show
The shock of the new: our 1930s time travellers in the thoroughly modern surroundings of the BFI Southbank
Those nice—if somewhat eccentric—people at the BFI offered the NSC a bunch of free tickets to see Gold Diggers of 1933, part of their current Ginger Rogers season, on condition we dressed in period-appropriate clothing. This is something we have done before, such as when we went to see Top Hat wearing top hats and white tie. I guess it is a publicity stunt, but the BFI never send a photographer, nor do they seem to do anything with the photos I send them. Still, we’re not complaining.
A group of us had booked into the India Club afterwards, a slightly ramshackle restaurant on the Strand that looks as if nothing has changed there since the 1940s. However, the screening was delayed by half an hour because a pigeon had got into the auditorium, so we emerged too late for the restaurant and went to the Delaunay instead, where they now greet us with a glad cry. The pigeon incident was bizarre, as the staff harried it with torch beams, like searchlights against the night sky during the Blitz, and tried poking it with a stick to dislodge it from the speaker bracket where it was perching. But when it moved it simply flew around until it found another perch. The staff said they had called some Pigeon Rescue volunteers, though these certainly didn't turn up while we were there. The staff said they feared the bird might interfere with the screening, but after half an hour they decided to go ahead anyway. In fact the pigeon did precisely that—it kept fluttering in front of the picture. My theory is that it thought the edge of the image frame was a solid object, as it seemed to be trying to land on it. At other times it sat on the sill of the window through which the projector beam came, creating a huge pigeon shadow on the movie. I thought this might prompt the staff to pull the plug but they seemed to have given up by that point, and no one in the audience seemed to respond with anything but amusement. What larks.
You can see some photos from the afternoon at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720307543355.
Looking at home in the Delaunay afterwards