This edifice is a useless heap of concrete which is going to become even more useless

Freddie from Planning has now decreed that the former cinema will retain its site of special interest status because ‘it deserved a chance to survive’, although survive as what is anyone’s guess, because there’s certainly no great demand for it as a cinema, that’s for sure.

When she read the story, particularly the comment on Senator Cohen’s decision from the building’s owners, C Le Masurier, that the Odeon will now remain ‘an empty, functionless building’, Herself remarked, à la Mandy Rice-Davies: ‘Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?’

And given that company’s track record from way back, when its principal nice little earner was selling booze, preferably from premises it owned, the chances are that when bits start falling off the building they’ll put some scaffolding up, and when more bits fall off they’ll put more scaffolding up, and so it will go on until some pinstripe gets a minister to tell them that it’s unsafe, just like what they owned at the St Ouen end of the Five Mile Road. Then they’ll be ordered to demolish it.

And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least that they ask that lot in the Big House to pay for the demolition, on some grounds or other – and they’ll be free to go ahead with the £40 million development of the area that they pulled the rug on when their crude attempt at blackmailing Freddie from Planning didn’t come off.

I have no sympathy with either the building’s owners or those who oppose its demolition. As it is, the edifice is a useless heap of concrete which, unless there is an unlikely change of mind from either the Planning Minister or C Le Masurier, is going to become more useless as every year passes.

Of course the luvvies who fought for its survival will now become about as useful as a chocolate fireguard when it comes to doing something practical about the impasse that has been reached.

I would hazard a guess that they’ll come up with a whole host of ideas about what the building can be used for, and most of them will involve us – the poor old taxpayers who this crowd seem to think have money trees in the back garden – shelling out either to buy the heap from Le Masurier’s or – in the unlikely event of them giving it away (pigs fuelled, ready to fly) to take on the cost of running it.

The stance adopted by the luvvies is possibly going to be about as subtle a form of blackmail as that adopted by Le Masurier’s – a sort of variation on the David Gainsborough Roberts theme of ‘No pride in your Island’ nonsense – in order to get their way.

I, of course, will be told – as I usually am – that I don’t know anything about anything, particularly buildings, heritage, the arts and so on. In their eyes, this disenfranchises me when it comes to an equal – with them – opportunity to express a view.

Had it been West’s Cinema, or even more so, the Forum, I would have argued with them that the buildings should be preserved unless there were compelling reasons not to. But the Odeon? Like much of the rest of St Helier, it could be in the middle of Basingstoke. And there is absolutely nothing local about it at all.

Just to declare an interest, my association with the Odeon goes back to when it was a building site on which I and the Cobden boys from Nelson Street – tough lot, they were – used to re-enact the war our fathers had just returned from. This playground was just around the corner from another old stamping ground – the Fire Station, which was then on a site which backed on to what became the Odeon.

I was among the crowd outside on the night it opened – for the world première of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest – and this column is probably not the best place in which to describe in any detail what went on in the downstairs back row (left-hand side facing the screen, for those who thrive on trivia) at the Sunday evening performances as I progressed from playing on building sites to the discovery that even if they didn’t play cricket, girls had their attractions.

A further recollection from those days is that for some reason which we patrons of the aforementioned back row on Sundays never quite understood, the cinema’s management used to employ two plain-clothed police officers (States police, not honoraries) to watch us.

There was never any disorder that I can recall, though others may have better memories, and I’d be pleased to hear from them. And I have a feeling that it was mostly young officers who carried out this not unpleasant duty. As to what I saw some of them get up to, my lips are sealed and my head will roll with them still sealed.

Happy days, but those are insufficient reasons, I’m afraid, to retain a building which is not particularly attractive and is certain to become less so, has no local status or attributes to warrant its retention and cannot fulfil a useful function.

Much as it pains me to say it about the company, Freddie would have been better giving Le Masurier’s the nod. At least the area’s redevelopment would have provided people with work.

AND finally . . . Thanks to Clive Jones for his excellent letter on the success story that is Highlands College. Until he pointed it out, I had no idea that some of the fiscal stimulus money has been spent encouraging a further 156 students to stay in education.

So the cash wasn’t all wasted on Victoria Avenue, then. That’s good.