Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(49)
Here, shorn of his vestments and wearing a casual navy sweater with dog collar just visible underneath, Father Balance revealed the pleasingly venal, earthbound side of himself; he was one of those rare, one might say improbable, creatures within the Irish clergy, the parish priest with a second job – in this case, overseeing the running of the cinema and checking his punters to make sure no one was taking in sweets from outside. A Sunday morning spent declaiming from the pulpit with the stately gravitas of an aristocrat would be followed by an afternoon spent delighting at the matinee crowds, his eyes folding into dollar signs like an old-timey medicine show huckster. I think I might have seen him laughing into the till once. On this occasion in July 1993, he was practically jogging on the spot and rubbing his hands together with glee, since the crowd that day was massive.
‘Ah, how are you, Joe?’ he said to my dad upon our arrival, discreetly scanning each of us for the tell-tale bulge of contraband confectionery.
‘Come for the dinosaurs, stay for Goldblum’s best role yet,’ he added, picking up a passing infant and shaking him by the ankles until some Skittles fell out.
It was nice to see this bizarro-world version of Father Huck, ordinarily quite a stern and taciturn figure. When the cinema was doing well, it seemed to give him real joy, a joy we never really saw at Mass. It didn’t hurt that the parish owned the building and so he had no rent to pay on a prime location in the city centre. And even the most committed parishioner might consider the free-market implications of his having a captive audience of dedicated churchgoers. He promoted the latest releases in the parish bulletin handed out at Mass, which gave rise to some delightfully abrupt tonal shifts. On any given week, it might declare the death of a beloved member of the congregation, announce that the Vatican had just declared 1993 to be the Year of the Orphan, and end with ‘He’s got John Travolta’s smile, Kirstie Alley’s eyes and the voice of Bruce Willis, so run don’t walk to the city premiere of Look Who’s Talking Too (PG, 81 mins, NO outside consumables allowed).’
Looking back, it seems odd that the church ran this thing on the side, not least since Father Balance genuinely appeared to have a flair for the business. He greeted the throngs of people who came to see Jurassic Park with an excitement that, while not being especially godly, was massively relatable. It even showcased the sort of buzzy attention to detail that seemed a bit more earnest than the mere cash grab I risk depicting here. In 1988, for example, he built up anticipation for 0352 INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE by playing the first two films (0477 and 0478 respectively – my father had a knack for recording these things out of order) as back-to-back features for a few weekends beforehand. While I was too young to have watched the Indiana Jones movies in the cinema, and 0458 LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO was hardly a tentpole of my cinematic education, it’s no exaggeration to say that 0587 JURASSIC PARK changed my life.
It’s hard to overstate just how massively influential that film was on me, and the extent to which it became the film I judged all others against. It was not long after this that I started carrying around my little cereal box dinosaur den. It was the first film that did that to me, and the first time I realised the films I liked didn’t really have the same effect on my dad. The biggest reaction he had to Jurassic Park was a hearty guffaw at the implication that Lex, Richard Attenborough’s precocious granddaughter, would be sufficiently tech literate to operate the park’s security system.
‘Ha! A UNIX system?’ he scoffed, out loud, in the cinema. ‘Good luck!’
It wasn’t that he didn’t like films. Far from it – he absorbed them just as cheerily as anyone, and can be moved to tears on occasion. But for my dad, the doing of the thing was more important than the thing done; some of the things he chose to record are testament to nothing more than completist zeal. Some are clearly of personal interest: 0269 ARCHBISHOP DALY’S INVESTITURE, which recorded our friend – and latterly distant cousin – Bishop Daly getting his big promotion, or 1989’s 0127A COUNTRY WESTERN MUSIC AWARDS. Neither would necessarily be present in other people’s archives but they do, at least, speak to my father’s tastes. The same can’t be said for seven POLICE ACADEMY films.
As well as a bewildering array of Northern Irish special-interest programmes, he also included some home video he’d shot himself, camcorder footage from holidays and christenings, weddings and other family events. One notable entry is 0097A DERRY FEIS, a collection of films he’d recorded of us singing and performing at the feis, or talent competition, at which we competed every year, and which would surely have tested the enthusiasm of even the most dutiful parent. The observant reader will by now have discerned that its designation of 0097A reveals this to be the second part of a double bill. You will be pleased to discover this collection of indifferently performed Irish-language ballads sung by children did not follow footage of some other social engagement, but came directly after 0097 MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, THE. Again, you’d have to be in a very specific mood.
He added supplementary details even for those home-shot videos. It was funny to see O’REILLY FAMILY or FR BRIAN DARCY listed as the stars of films, interrupting an otherwise unbroken run of Hollywood A-listers. Stirring, too, to see the note attached to 0211 CHRISTMAS IN DERRY 1989, confirming it was FILMED ON LOCATION IN MULLENNAN, DERRY. As a slightly tongue-in-cheek bit of dad humour this would be quite amusing, but since I know my father to have been entirely serious when he added these words, it’s funnier still.