JOHN LAYFIELD and his wife will soon be able to enjoy a film at his local cinema.

Going to the pictures on anything like a regular basis will be a novel experience for him.

While his skill has helped generations laugh and cry at dramas being played out on the silver screen at the Odeon, Middlesbrough, projectionist John can count the number of films he has seen on one hand.

He entered the industry as an apprentice to his father, Harry, at the age of 15.

His many years in the industry entitles him to cut-price tickets to any cinema in the land for every week of the year.

He misses musicals such as Oklahoma and The Sound of Music. Unable to watch the films because he was working, John sang along to the songs.

"When I go to the club, people ask me what such-and-such a film is like - and I tell them I don't know.

"They think all you do is go to work, sit down, and watch a film all day. But you do not have the time to watch the film."

There were films that seemed to run and run, like the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor epic, Cleopatra - one of the most expensive movies ever made.

"When we had Cleopatra on, it was shown so long you just about knew all the dialogue," said John, who bemoans the passing of films of substance.

"It is all special effects these days. It does not matter what the actual films are about."

The Odeon, Middlesbrough, closes later this month. Bosses threw in the towel in face of competition from an 11-screen UGC cinema about to open next door.

John is the last projectionist in the last picture house in town.

Middlesbrough used to be peppered with cinemas. Two old music halls started showing moving pictures in 1908. By 1914 there were four cinemas, increasing to eight in the late 1920s. Six more picture palaces opened in the 1930s, the last one to open being the Odeon, stars Polly Ward and Garry Marsh - of George Formby film fame - attending the opening on February 25, 1939.

Once, during a showing of the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, pop singer Lulu arrived unexpectedly, bought her ticket and settled down to enjoy the show.

Manager Tony Myhill said the arrival of the Odeon would have been an event in the decade before television.

"A place like this - plush and modern - would have been above the experience of the ordinary person," he said.

"That's where the concept of picture palaces came from."

He said the heyday of cinema was the 1930s.

"By the time the 1950s came in, radio had taken over and then television started taking over."

Now the traditional cinema has made way for the modern multiplex and the world will not see its like again