Do you remember how we got the news in moving pictures before the advent of TV? Of course you do. You got your newsreel – either Movietone or Pathé – every week when you went to the cinema where, despite express delivery, it was already a fortnight out of date.

But do you also remember the days when some towns could boast a cinema entirely devoted to news items and kindred subjects?

This came to mind this month when one of the most famous news cinemas in the North – the Bijou NewsReel cinema, which opened in 1937 on Pilgrim Street in Newcastle – became a news item itself. Designed by Dixon Scott, the great-uncle of the film directors Ridley and Tony Scott, it was a real dream palace, the last word in Art Deco chic.

One of its keenest fans is Lord Ramsbotham, the former chief inspector of prisons, who fondly remembers the days during the war when he made regular Saturday visits to the cinema as a schoolboy with his shilling pocket money to spend on the trip: one ha’penny tram ride there, a ninepenny ticket, a penny sherbet dab, a penny spearmint chew and the last ha’penny for the ride home. He still recalls the programmes with relish: both newsreels, of course, a Charlie Chaplin (silent, with subtitles), a Popeye the Sailor cartoon, Hello Aloha (Disney’s Goofy in a grass skirt) and, and . . .

“Fitzpatrick travelogues,” I cut in excitedly, “where luggage never gets lost and which always ends with the cliché: ‘And as the sun sets slowly in the West, we reluctantly say farewell to the tropical paradise we call . . .’ ” “I remember, I remember,” says his lordship, as we continue to swap movie memories. There was Night Mail (1936), where train wheels thrum to W. H. Auden’s evocative poem of the same name, set to marvellous music by Benjamin Britten: “This is the Night Mail crossing the border/ Bringing the cheque and the postal order.”

And those wonderful Ministry of Information shorts such as How to Use Your Gas Mask, How to Boil an Egg, How to Deal With an Incendiary Bomb and the five-minute thriller Miss Grant Goes to the Door, where two ladies foil a German parachutist who lands in the garden.

Although our cinemas were hundreds of miles apart, I saw very similar programmes at the Classic in Southampton – until, sadly, it became a victim of the Blitz. But luckily the Bijou – alone of those phenomenal newsreel cinemas – lives on, restored and rejuvenated and born again as of last Thursday as the Tyneside. The foyers and stairwells with their spectacular mosaics, ceiling decorations and stained-glass windows have transformed the Tyneside to its former glory. There will be four screens – the Classic (the original Art Deco gem, including leather armchairs), the Roxy, the Electra and the Digital Lounge.

But that’s not all. The film director Mike Figgis is among the patrons responsible for the two new state-of-the-art digital screens, concealed behind translucent walls and roof space, integrated into the historic design. He is also the inspiration behind a digital film production lab available for the training of the film-makers of tomorrow, from preto postproduction, who then have the opportunity to have their work distributed around the world.

The cinema will also be providing more than 40 film, digital and animation courses a year to 6,000 adults and schoolchildren. It will host two new international film festivals: Northern Lights and AV, the latter specifically for electronic arts and digital experimentation.

So, for all wannabe film-makers, and I include myself, it’s next stop Newcastle. And for those historians among us who miss their newsreels, we can tour the exhibits for free and even feel the familiar flap, click and whirr of starting an old projector. Or, better yet, see the famous newsreel The Hindenburg Disaster (1937), playing every morning at 10 until July 3 in this splendid pleasure palace.

www.tynecine.org

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