THE ELECTRIC (CINEMA) COUNTDOWN

THE clock starts ticking from midnight tonight... towards the centenary celebrations of the UK's oldest working cinema.

The Electric Cinema on Station Street in Birmingham showed its first performance on December 30, 1909.

After a period of real uncertainty a decade ago, current owner Tom Lawes has to be congratulated for what he has achieved since he bought the cinema in 2004 ready to relaunch it.

Tom has modernised the building to a degree, while remaining faithful ot its more eclectic period touches so that people who wouldn't be seen dead in a mulitplex will still feel most at home here.

For a few dollars more, you can now share a sofa at the back of Screen 1 (something the Odeon New Street should have been willing to try in Screen 8) or you can just watch your film in the old fashioned way.

Upstairs in Screen 2, what is still the best proportioned screen in the whole of the city has also reopened as a digital screen.

Tom has also spent a few bob making the ground floor loo into one suitable for disabled access (but do try to call in advance so they can get the outside ramp in place just so that you can enter the building).

On top of all this, the Electric is now showing an increasingly varies and voluminous mixture of films.

And Tom's band is amazingly good at reproducing classic movie hits like Live and Let Die.

The only things the Electric needs now is to find a way of masking the still distracting emergency exit signs beneath the screen, a telegram for its 100th birthday from the Queen...

And, of course, a reel-ly good birthday cake ready for next year's celebrations!

For more information, visit the cinema's excellent website at www.theelectric.co.uk which includes the following brief summary of its history:

1909 On the 30th of December the cinema shows its first performance.
1922 Renamed 'Select Cinema'.
1931 On the 14th of November the cinema closed and became an amusement arcade.
1937 The building added a gallery upstairs (now screen 2) and became the 399 seat Tatler News Theatre
1970 The cinema becomes 'The Jacey'
1980 A second screen is added upstairs and the cinema becomes 'The Classic'.
1984 The 'Tivoli' opens on a strict diet of soft porn and horror.
1993 The cinema is renamed back to The Electric and becomes a two screen repertory theatre.
2004 Cinema bought by Thomas Lawes Media Ltd and undergoes conversion to a centre for film making and exhibition.