A Day in the Life of the Dukes

For today's post I am going to hand over to Jon Barrenchea who is the manager of the Duke of York's Picturehouse:


As a cinema manager, people often ask me, what do you do all day? Cheekier ones ask if keeping the popcorn warm really requires a ‘manager’. Let me indulge you with some of the stuff we do at The Duke of York’s Picturehouse.

First of all, without films we really don’t have a cinema, so making sure the films have arrived is the most important thing. Films these days normally play on a digital drive, about 150-200 Gigabytes in size, which are delivered via courier. Once these arrive, our projectionist Jimmy (who’s been here since 1980) will upload them onto our 1.5 tetrabyte server, test it, and then send the drive it arrived in back.

We often get old-fashioned film prints as well, and the process isn’t as straightforward. 35mm prints arrive in reels, usually around six per film, (each reel is about 15 minutes) and then Jimmy will assemble the print onto one big reel. That is then thread through our hybrid 1950s/1970s film projector and shown on the screen.

Other things I get up to are editing our bimonthly listings brochure, programming late night shows, organising comedy and music events, promoting the cinema, and of course updating our website and my blog.

Like any venue, we have to keep things clean and tidy, order stock, change the bulbs, pay people and reply to customer enquiries.

One of the exciting projects we have right now is the 100^th Anniversary preparations, I can't reveal all the details just yet but there will be a celebratory event on 22nd September. The Dukes has such a great history, it’s such a treat to work here.

And yes, we do have to make sure the popcorn is fully stocked and warm!