What’s The Point?

It was a while before I realised that the concrete cows of Milton Keynes, though reassuring, and amusing, to pre-school me, had a national reputation and kinda summed up what the UK thought of its errant lovechild MK. People definitely took the piss in all kinds of ways; I vaguely remember someone made a sort of penny-for-the-guy-esque bull out of straw and jumpers that they arranged in a humping position on one of the tolerant and nobly un-uddered adults. Apparently, they've since been kidnapped, mutilated, and intentionally diseased and they are still shorthand for people to snigger at the concept of the new town.

The cows were born in 1978, same as I was and same as my own personal favourite MK monument was, the Peartree Bridge Dinosaur. This is a fibreglass triceratops planted in a field that toddler Tessa would christen 'The Monster in the Trees' and beg her dad to drive past so she could wave at, that the creator, Bill Billings, slept in the belly of whilst he was building it and that stands today having undergone at least 2 dozen paint jobs, including a spiderman outfit.

Milton Keynes itself is not much older than the cows or the Monster in the Trees and to some people, it's an unholy graph-paper grid with silly conceptual art pieces and ideas above its bus station. In the 1980s, it was possibly the most exciting location accessible to me. I was a child from a town just down the road where very little ever changed or mattered so whose Friday evenings often consisted of visiting the mirrored shopping centre there. It was a bewildering planet of palm trees and violently orange crane flowers exploding out of massive planters, glass lifts that dropped you through the unnatural glow of the light fitting department of John Lewis and a wide, open indoor square where they once built an entire snow-covered village complete with bridge and those fucked-up, creepy figures lifting and lowering axes whilst grinning like Nurse Ratched at medication time.

As kids, we'd hare around that place at perilous pace, thrilled by the space, starving for the weeny shop that sold nothing but transfers (my own personal pleasure as a child - especially the dinosaur ones, see monster in the trees) and deely boppers. Sometimes, I can't believe we never smashed anything as we spent ages in that dead fancy shop full of garish crystal and porcelain cats, the type of emporium that was so fash for yuppies back then and who would get snooty when they saw minors cross the threshold.

I promise, I am getting to The Point

Then, as if all the excitement wasn't enough... As if meeting the the then mascot for Thorpe Park, Mr Rabbit, and getting a free polaroid with him there was not enough, just over forty years ago, they built something I had never seen before. It happened for me, as most things do for me. Other people found about the wondrously exotic new feature of MK and talked about it in front of me and I pretended I knew what they were talking about then by osmosis, I got The Point.

The Point was a cinema. Having no real conscious understanding, or indeed give-a-shitting, of the differences between old and new, or of what this meant for cinema evolution, I was ticklingly aware only of the peculiar scarlet straws tenting over familiar mirrored boxes which had sprung up outisde the southern exit of the commercial mothership. It was a weird building. Another exciting addition to the town's architectural Disneyland. Years later, when trying to explain The Point to non-Keynies, I found myself realising it was definitely the first multiplex I had ever seen and was not surprised, when looking it up, that in fact it was pretty much the first in the UK.

Funnily enough, I have always hated the concept of the multiplex. They seemed to me to loop around cinema and miss the whole darn point of 'going to the pictures'. Many times, I have lamented, almost in song, on the old ABC in Portsmouth, a juicy 1930s 3-screen joy, outside which you had to queue behind a little waist-height sign that said the name of the film you wanted, that they would eventually turn around to say 'sold out' and you'd have to go home, an unentertained failure. Oh how we missed that. We appreciated things so much then etc. Even being patted down by the blokes in waiscoats who tried to make sure you weren't sneaking in reasonably-priced minstrels from the outside. Even having to go to your Nan's to look in the local paper to see what was on, only to get there and find it was another fucking Star Trek instalment instead.

I say all this but I genuinely did love those places and take umbrage every time someone suggests I go to the movies because it means a soulless, stinky experience with a load of adults who don't know how to pick up the God-sized cups they drained and then let fall from their limp little hands. And boy, do I hate the smell of stale popcorn. I don't even like the smell of fresh popcorn. In fact, I hate popcorn but that is another blog. So yeah, I loved those beautiful buildings that had been standing since the depression only to be eaten cold with dumplings by the fixed grin of the multiplex.

A Peak Unique

So potentially, I could lay their demonic rise at the red-girdered foundations of The Point. True, The Point's peak gestured at a possibility of how cinema could go i.e. into the chasm of characterlessness but it has to be remembered that in the 1980s, home entertainment had reached previoulsy unimagined heights. You could actually buy 'Jaws' on VHS and rewind it to repeatedly watch the Kintner boy bisected AND talk all the way through the bits when Brody is talking to his kids without anyone bitching at you that you were ruining the picture. And so people were deserting the cinema in droves. It was a tragedy, but by the time I went to see 'Wayne's World' with my mates in 1992, we sat along the back row in a 500-seat auditorium, being the lairy 13-year-old pricks that we were, and annoyed not a soul because there was no soul to annoy.

So to be fair to The Point, it was paving the way back to the possiblity of cinema and we have indeed seen something of a revival thanks to the multiplexes. I am working on the assumption that seeing a film in a cinema is always preferable and most of the time it is. I have actually seen a couple of Peter Jackson's bloated flounders at the movies and not wanted to poke out my eyes with my own feet whereas at home, it's virtually impossible.

But not just that. The Point is the point. The building is the point. When that thing went up, it might have horrified some people but I'd bet, not people who were familiar with Milton Keynes. It's a key to the Keynes in some respects, part of its personality in that when it was built, it could not have appeared anywhere else... first. Milton Keynes was that place that built things like The Point, seemingly just because. And other places erected similar things after that but MK always seemed to me, to be the pioneer of the architectural mic-drop. Follow that, old towns.

I went back to the MK centre after years of absence, showing my partner the shopping centre, which stuffed me with the old locational frisson of my formative years and baffled him with its inorganic eccentricity. We covered the entire floor space of the place, me explaining to him that outside one of those doors, we would discover The Point. Which we did, when we reached the final door.

The Point lay at a short distance, still accusing the Buckinghamshire sky, that skeletal pyramid with the same old weird elegance. Though I could see no bodies milling around it, no hordes bombing in and out for their blockbusters. There were some missing mirrored panels turning the facade's former sunny grin to a sunken leer and boards were plastered over the doors. A cold whisper of its former self, I had returned to find that hugely exciting revolution a toothless and lonely shell and it seems, it is sentenced to death.

There is a campaign to save it. As someone who backed the campaign to save the mesmerising, brutalist beauty that was The Tricorn of Portsmouth, was sadly disappointed, then watched not only the demolition but the bitter regret of most people since, I would like to see it saved. In the grand scheme of things, yeah I know, who gives a fuck right? There are horrors with which we should all be conerning ourselves and fighting back against. And they come first, of course they do. And I promised myself this would be a silly blog post that was personal, a wander around my own dumbass childhood, but actually some of the bigger issues feature in the potential saving of The Point.

The trash and trade move that will allow a unique and culturally significant building to be flattened to make way for 487 flats, which we all know will not be anything that most of us recognise as affordable in two lifetimes, is another bum note in the super-rich's songbook. Perhaps some things are much worthier of preservation than this ex-movie house and bingo hall. No doubt. But I find myself longing for its endurance anyhow.

The Point Float

The last year I lived in Flitwick, the town up the road from Milton Keynes, was my last year at Primary School. Flitwick always used to hold a carnival, in which everyone would be involved and the school would put all the final year pupils on its float. It was possbily the most excited I have ever been in my life. The night before was the one time I can ever remember not being able to sleep for sheer delight. The floats' theme that year was movies so each one devoted itself to a film. Except Templefield School. No, we devoted ourselves to a cinema - The Point.

The Point would have been a couple of years old by that stage but still, it was that exciting to people that they made a replica 'point' on top of that flatbed lorry. It sat over a little makeshift audience in rows and us kids got to dress up, basically in our school uniforms (which sucked a bit, I won't lie) but with popcorn hats to signify that we were usherettes. We celebrated The Point then and everyone in town was mighty impressed. I don't know what they made that 'point' out of and I don't know why it didn't collapse on top of us.

My point is that it seemed like something special. I was rattled when I saw it gaping like a skull where other Milton Keynes badges still brag their position. It is part of that living memory assembly of a new town and it heralded the questionable transformation of cinema attendance, for good or bad, it's notable. I'd be sad to see it go, not least because its destruction would make a mockery of my cardboard popcorn hat, which I wore with pride on that hot 1988 day. The Point holds a piece of me in its empty, littered foyer even if the movies I remember seeing there rank among the worst cinematic exploits ever. It's definitely that time of year that one can admit to seeing 'Santa Claus: The Movie' at the pictures, but thanks to The Point, I enjoyed seeing Dudley Moore dusted with rouge, dressed in green felt and being rescued from icy death by the Super-Duper-Looper. Now if that ain't a building worth saving...