When the credits rolled on Anna and the King at the ABC in East Street, Brighton, last Thursday, it was The End for the cinema, too. After almost 70 years it closed to become a casino and restaurants.
Naturally, we wrote our own tribute to the ABC. It didn't go down well with Ruth Ellen, from Brighton, though. Our spread did not give a proper sense of the cinema's history or the real atmosphere of that sad day, she said.
I cannot accept our report last Friday was either clumsy or hasty as she claimed. I thought we caught the mood well by concentrating on some of the people who went to say lump-in-the-throat goodbyes, but I accept we spoilt it a bit by spelling general manager Peter Rubie's name wrong.
Also, Ruth, I think it was better to see pictures of them rather than shots of the inside and the projection equipment as you would have preferred.
I agree our piece was short on detailed history but since we have written about the ABC many times, we left that to our sister paper, the Brighton and Hove Leader.
Even so, Ruth was annoyed to see a claim in their piece the cinema was no longer financially viable. Screens had sold out many times, even in the past year and queues stretched along East Street.
She accused the owners of neglecting the building so they could sell it. Foolish, she said, because selling High Street cinemas to finance multiplexes doesn't work. Small local cinemas can be successful. What happened to the ABC should be a lesson to us all.
We had a bit of fun last Thursday with the mis-spelt name of Saltdean Garage on its new signs. The missing T mix-up had been good for business, said new owner Nick Dray.
Signs had been ordered before Nick bought the business but you might have thought from our story the previous owner was to blame for the lost letter.
No, says former boss Colin Mills, of Seaford. He e-mailed me to say he had "signed off" the correct spelling but something went wrong during the subsequent convoluted process involving Skoda HQ in the Czech Republic and German sign-makers.
We got in a mess with a story last Thursday about sewage streaming down the windows of a family's council flat. It seems there had been a bit of to'ing and fro'ing about getting a pipe fixed.
We contacted Brighton and Hove Council on January 11. A surveyor checked work done on December 14 and found the pipe had been repaired but the problem remained. A new pipe was in place by January 13.
However, last Thursday, seven days later and after everything was okay, we said the pipe was still leaking.
Peter Sipple, the council's assistant director (technical), let us have both barrels: "It would seem you neither had the courtesy to follow up the original inquiry to check what might have happened nor the good sense to investigate the matter further."
Guilty as charged and no excuses. The story sloshed around our computer system and no one thought to check again. Mr Sipple said he would have expected something better from the Argus. You certainly deserved it.
Finally, e-mailer Steve Rhodes noticed the Night Final edition on Tuesday was priceless, literally. We slipped up and left the 30p price off. Anyway, you all know the paper is worth every penny.
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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