Here is an interesting description of an outing to see an English film at the Drive-In cinema in Mombasa around 1960:
"There was no television, and so sometimes my mother and father would go to the drive-in cinema. Since the weather was almost always hot and dry, the drive-in was a favorite venue for them. However, on occasions, during the monsoon it would rain, and they would watch the screen with the windscreen wipers going! It didn’t spoil the evening. They didn’t have carry cots or anything like that for David and I, so they used to get an empty drawer from a chest of drawers and put a blanket in it and place us on the back seat and take us with them. (No seat belts of course!). In later years we were able to stay up on the back seat of the car until the credits rolled at the beginning of the film. It was a great night out for us as well, as it usually meant a sausage in a roll and perhaps a swig of dad’s beer before bed if we were lucky. The drive-in cinema only seemed to play one record before the film, ‘Apache’ by the Shadows which echoed over the vast car park. To this day, when I hear that record, I think of the Drive In at Mombasa.
Generally, in those days the cinema was quite amateurish. The adverts before the film were usually ‘slides’ project on the screen. It was quite common for an advert on a slide to be shown upside down and hurriedly changed! The films were often 1950’s Ealing productions, they were always accompanied by a ‘funny’ (a cartoon – often Tom and Jerry), and a ‘short’, which was a ‘B’ movie. Along with this was a newsreel, by Pathé news, giving us the British national news from about two months ago, narrated in a very ‘clipped’ upper class British accent. Since there were no foreign newspapers, this was the only way of knowing what was going on in Britain."
source: https://petegoddard.pw/882-2
The Shadows - Apache: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TwULx_wDiI
Amazing!!...I recall around 1974 the Regal had only one Beatles vinyl record album that was played every day for many months!!...until my school friend Hitesh, who worked at Assanands brought me many cassettes of the latest English Hits that I handed over to the projectionist!!
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