Piece for Pembrokeshire

Nolton drive-in

When someone told me that Pembrokeshire's finest public horse riding venue, Nolton Stables, was now also running a drive-in cinema, my brain immediately imagined a Putlocker-sourced video (logo and computer mouse visible on screen) of Dirty Dancing, projected onto the side of a derelict wooden barn with an odor of horse shit in the air. And of course the smell of horse shit would have been fine if we were watching Equus, it would actually work as some kind of 4D immersive experience. While that reverie has a certain cosy-shabby charm to it, this mental image was completely undermined when I drove our white VW polo into an emptied clifftop field overlooking the Atlantic ocean, and my eyes were met with an industrial-sized cinema screen shrouded in scaffolding. A mind-boggling anachronism, so fittingly out-of-place, was the contrast I didn’t know could be both unsettling and homely at once.

With toilets positioned behind the screen, my neurospicy brain OBVIOUSLY created some kind of irrational scenario in which the toilets and screen were somehow connected, and I had stumbled into an elaborate daytime prank, and as soon as someone went behind the screen to use the loos, footage of the person on the toilet would suddenly be broadcast on screen for everyone to see and then after you’d have to come out and see that everyone is laughing and when you look back at the screen the picture is just the regular film at a moment that isn’t even particularly funny and everyone is looking at you trying to repress their giggles and you don’t know WHY. *Massive inhale*

One thing I can tell you though, is that the sound of Music is definitely the right film to watch while situated in the middle of vast grassland; it’s like you’re there in the hills with Andrews. But that realness quickly dissipates when you’ve got my mother sitting next to you insisting on singing every word into your ear with a vibrato more forced than Theresa May’s ‘jovial’ dance onto the stage in 2018. My immersion into the film was bolstered when I caught my reflection in the rear mirror and realised that my Suite Life of Zac and Cody haircut made me look exactly like a Von Trapp son. Ahhh, Kurt and Freidrich. Fred ‘n’ Kurt. Though that kind of makes it sound like a sitcom about two American ‘bros’ that get themselves into scrapes due to their own mental lethargy and wear ‘funny’ t-shirts with things like ‘my alarm clock is trying to kill me.’ written on them.

It is not just the overall incredibly smooth-running operating of this newly-born business, it is the wonderfully friendly environment that sees all audience members clapping at whooping at the end of a film, or during at a particularly poignant moment, it is the muffled belting along to songs from inside peoples’ cars that they think you can’t hear, and it is the overall heart-warming sentiment of a small organisation that have done something to make a difference, and keep people’s calendars busy and spirits up, in the age of a global pandemic. Although, while adorned with eight poles protruding up from the back of the screen by about a metre, I couldn’t help but notice this is the amount of letters in EVERYMAN, and think that they’d missed an opportunity here to stick a letter on each one and create the company’s first mobile branch. Ill whack it in the suggestion box.

I sincerely hope they decide to do a showing of Jaws, a clifftop field overlooking the Atlantic Ocean could be the ultimate viewing spot?!