"Hurry and answer that phone - it's almost 2.30pm"

One of the perks of working on AP was counterbalancing the unpaid overtime and everyone hating you by inventing new methods of endemic laziness. Perhaps the most successful of these was the Friday Afternoon Trip To The Pictures, adopted by AP after returning from lunch to see The Matt Bielby Golden Age and the entire staff of (we think) Arcade celebrating (we think) finishing their first ish by queuing to see True Lies as a strictly one-off adventure.

Our version reflected the essential elements.

AP's adopted home-town of Bath boasted three cinemas, and by chance their schedules coincided around a daily 2.45pm matinee, so we had no need to cut short our 1pm to 2pm lunch hour. (Actually, it preferred to boast about Bath Spa, still only partly refurbished 10 years after it was announced 200 years after it closed, but you know what we mean.)

THE ABC

Largest in town, the ABC was converted from a bingo hall or a church hall or a music-hall or something, and after extensive refitting had the acoustic qualities of a bingo hall or a church hall or a music-hall or something. The ABC changed hands several times, though none were interested in poking the speakers about a bit. Extensive investigation by Friday Afternoon Trip To The Pictures participants over the years concluded that the ABC's movie soundtrack was supplied by a kazoo positioned centrally behind the bottom of the screen. Later claims in an expensive trailer-preceding promo of an upgrade to "Dolby Digital" evoked peals of merriment almost immediately absorbed by the auditorium's needlessly elaborate cornices.

THE ROBINS

(No apostrophic information supplied.) The Bath version of a multiplex, with three screens: one quite big, one not that big, and one memorably described by two-pages-of-Total editor and gadget victim Steve Jarratt as, "My television is bigger than this." The Robins has now closed.

THE LITTLE THEATRE

An independent picture-house which showed movies the two mainstream cinemas wouldn't touch, plus the occasional blockbuster to pay for enough apples and stout sticks to keep the receivers disguised as doctors at bay. The large main screen and curly-haired manager who'd personally tear up your tickets were not quite as entertaining as the rickety upstairs auditorium, guaranteed to enliven any performance with its steep seating and winningly granny-flat split-level construction. There was also a door you could go through by mistake and run around on a kind of external connecting corridor loomed over by architecture, as if you'd briefly banged into the open air on a ghost train or comedy minecart ride. Nobody ever discovered what lay behind the door opposite, as the bemusement of everyone who stumbled outside by accident would quickly be supplanted by strutting back and forth, waving at the oblivious people below and patently pretending they were kings on a balcony. The Little Theatre remains AP's favourite.

Come what may, come Friday afternoon the AP office would trot off to the pictures. Deadlines - all the games arriving forty-eight hours before we were due at the printers - important day-long games of Marathon - small fires - nothing would prevent everyone knocking off to watch a movie on company time.*

As the intention was to watch whatever started that afternoon, we exercised virtually no quality control, thus enjoying films we individually would otherwise have never thought to patronise, and also seeing Star Trek 7.

The one flaw in the plan was that the ABC, obviously backed by powerful business interests with profits bolstered by dedicated underinvestment, nearly always had new films first. Our carefully cultivated snook-cocking AP rebellion was therefore slightly tempered by an inability to hear more than 38% of the dialogue.

How we shook our fists in thwarted rage as we left the cinema and stopped by the office to pick up our coats on the way home, or waved as we passed Amiga Format's office, we forget which.