Saturday Night At The Movies

Last weekend I felt the nerves and guilt only the innocent experience as I was caught up for a couple of hours in a high security operation. It felt quite menacing being surrounded by mean looking guys in black suits, talking in to walkie talkies and staring at me through high powered nightscope lenses, but I tried to ignore them and carried on eating my choc ice.

This could have been a secret service stake out, a police surveillance operation or a Taliban Talent Night, but the security was much tighter than that. It was, in fact, the first screening in the UK of the movie High School Musical 3.

Working for a radio station I’m lucky and get invited to all sorts of premieres, concerts and glamorous events. I’m usually invited as the night’s piece of rough, but the trade off is that I also have to suffer going to things that put me to sleep, simply because my kids want to go. I begged and pleaded, and even managed, to get out of going to the musical Wicked, but High School Musical was a body swerve too far for me to manage and so, joining hundreds of screaming teenage girls, I took my seat at Disney’s new movie. The cynic in me wants to say it was a pile of steaming, money grubbing, manure but the cynic in me has left the building. I didn’t fall asleep, the kids had a great time and the choc ices were particularly good.

HSM3 is the current teenage feel good movie, reminiscent of more innocent times, more moody than hoodie, and the story is a bit like one of those old black and white rainy Sunday afternoon movies featuring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney where every problem is solved with someone shouting “I know how to cheer us all up, let’s put on a show”.

Got caught stealing apples? Let’s put on a show. Mom and Pop catch you listening to that new fangled popular beat music? Let’s put on a show. Been arrested shoplifting lager while smuggling coke in your baby’s pram? Let’s put on a show. In short The High School Musical franchise is as innocent and wholesome a way of parting kids from their money as there could be.

These movies will have escaped your attention if you don’t have kids but you really need to know about them in case you’re ever a contestant in a quiz where popular culture comes up as your topic for a million pounds. It’s a phenomenon selling millions of DVDs and albums, not to mention lunch boxes, posters, back packs and over one hundred and sixty other items. You can rail against it all you want but you’d be a very sad person indeed. It’s simply the new millennium’s answer to Grease or Saturday Night Fever, a movie franchise featuring the most subtle, understated and quiet advertising campaign a marketing budget the size of Iceland’s debt can buy.

I remember the excitement of seeing Saturday Night Fever for the first time and my young brain thinking how smart and witty the dialogue was, especially in the scene outside the club where one of Tony’s mates has bagged the new girl in town and taken her out to the back seat of his car. The panting noises left little to the imagination but, just after the screams subsided, I heard my first classic movie line. “That was great. Er, what did you say your name was?” Too young to be James Bond, I vowed that if ever I managed to kiss a girl, that was the line I was going to use.

The music was everywhere I went in Glasgow back then and continued for years afterwards. When I worked at a local station called Radio Clyde, alongside a disco DJ called Mr Superbad, I’ll never forget him reading out a request from a woman who had lost her son. The boy had been burned to death in a house fire and, from out of the ashes, Superbad’s solemn requiem soared suitably phoenix like. “I’m so sorry for the loss of your son in that awful fire”, he said. “Let me cheer you up with a record. Here’s Disco Inferno.”

Of course back then movie previews and premieres were much simpler events as the film companies didn’t have to surround the audience with security men worried about mobile phones and small home video cameras pirating their investment. Even if we’d had the camera technology back then the best of Koreans would have found it difficult to hide a couple of hundred betamax video copies under their coats as they approached you in B&Q car park hissing “wanna buy video, cheap?”.

But back to High School Musical. My kids have souvenir posters, notebooks, backpacks and DVDs and even my wife, who I promise you still has a photo of Donny Osmond on her key ring, has put a song from the movie as her ring tone on her mobile. It’s embarrassing to sit with her as “We’re Flying, Soaring…..” echoes round restaurants or worse, funerals.

You’ll get the chance to see the film yourself when it opens worldwide in a few weeks time and if you go then you must tell me what happens when Zac Efron climbs up a drainpipe and enters Gabriella’s bedroom while she’s lying on the bed singing. Just as he entered, my eleven year old daughter said she would burst if she didn’t get to the loo. I offered to take her but she didn’t want to miss anything and, by the time I’d finished pleading, the action had moved on.

It gave me inspiration for an advertising slogan Disney can have for free for their campaign. It sums up the wholesomeness of the movie and the perfection of the cast. The line reads “High School Musical, where no one ever goes to the toilet”. Not even the security men.