Smalltown and Dullbridge Town Council’s latest accounts show that the previous Smalltown Culture and Arts Manager Debby Karmary’s scheme to attract people to the White Elephant Enclosure by showing old films has been yet another in a long line of unmitigated disasters.
In September 2021 the WEE secured ‘lifeline funding’ from the Government’s Cultural Recovery Fund to keep it running after a year’s closure due to the Corvid pandemic, with some of the money being spent on installing new film facilities. The WEE received £66,702 in October 2020 and £27,356 in April 2021.
The new facilities meant that the WEE was able to go head-to-head against Smalltown’s hugely successful Blitz Cinema. However, with the Blitz holding the contracts for the latest film releases, the WEE was only able to secure licences to screen old films.
The idea, proposed by the SCAM, was approved by the previous WEE Mismanagement Committee, who all agreed that it was a Most Magnificent idea which would guarantee to increase user numbers at the venue. The first of a series of monthly screenings took place in February 2022.
The licence for each film cost £87.00 (plus VAT) which allowed a maximum audience of 50 people and, with tickets priced at £5 each, this could have seen an income of £250 per screening.
Unfortunately, with regular audiences of between none and seven people, paying £5 each, the maximum income from a film screening has been £35.00, but it should be noted that on the majority of occasions no one showed the slightest interest in purchasing a ticket to see a film that would be available free of charge on a television set in their own home.
This means a loss of between £52 and £87 for each screening. As WEE disasters go this isn’t a huge loss (the Take This tribute act holds the record for that), but every loss mounts up and the lack of interest goes some way to demonstrate that residents of Smalltown and Dullbridge have been paying for something they are simply not interested in using and therefore get no benefit from.
Further licences were purchased to enable another of the SCAM’s sham ideas, the Give Any Money – Buy Tickets (GAMBiT) scheme, which offered audiences the chance to watch a film and decide what they wanted to pay, with a minimum suggested price of £2 per ticket, which included a free sausage and drink with each children’s ticket sold.
SomersetClive has been unable to ascertain the income received for the GAMBiT events, but it is likely that only the in-house cafe, Bellends Kitchen, made any money as they charged the WEE to provide the free sausage and drink.
Both the Old Film and GAMBiT screening events have now been quietly abandoned in the wake of the SCAM’s departure.