Midge Ure – Watching films onboard (and smoking)

So, when I first joined them, we didn’t have the media that we’ve got now. What we had was reel to reel, like the old cinema, the box set …

Simon: What literally film?

Literally on a tape.

Simon: What VHS or literally a film?

The reels, we used to draw the projector, and Submariners are allowed to smoke, so you had a Mess no bigger than this area, filled with smoke, with the clickety-clack going and the movie sort of projecting through the mist. It wasn’t a great environment. It looked good, but it wasn’t a healthy environment, so slowly but surely, the smoking went away and then the media updated so we now have, you know you’ve got a 65-inch telly with Blu-ray and all sorts of stuff on there now. Hard drives and discs that people bring. You basically download a load of movies, you bring them onboard and it’s not like a formal announcement, it’s just accepted that every night somebody … I think what we generally accept is that maybe the 8 o’clock shift at night, the ‘back-afties’ might put a movie on, or the ‘fore-endies’ or the Wes or the Sailors …

Simon: And people go between the front and the back?

Yeah. So, you maybe finish your evening meal, you tidy up the Mess, all hands in, you hoover, you clean, you polish, all that sort of stuff and then it’s movie time, so somebody then picks a movie and you get a feeling that withing five or ten minutes whether it was a good choice or not.

The unspoken word is that if you put a movie on and it’s not popular, you have to stay to the end of it. You’re not allowed to put a crap movie on and leave, because that’s what you would do. If you had decided, I’m going to bed, you put a real rubbish movie on ‘cos very rarely does a movie get stopped. You watch it right through because the decisions been made, you’re watching that movie and it’s … especially a Saturday night.