Christmas 1973

It was around Christmas 1973 when my Dad built for my brother and me, a puppet theatre complete with footlights, a proper house curtain that opened with a pull cord, a safety curtain with a winding handle and a removable stage floor so that the puppets could be operated properly from underneath. Along with the girls next door and a few others, we put on a whole variety of shows. However the thing that fascinated me the most was the lights. Dad had installed some battery operated footlights and it wasn’t long before I had him add on a front of house lighting bar. I then proceeded to dismantle several small torches, found several mini paint tins used for model making, attached them to the lighting bar, added coloured gel (sweet wrappers as far as I recall) to some of them, and then wired them up to the power controllers used for our ‘OO’ gauge model railway. Hey Presto… my first lighting job !