It's becoming almost trendy to namedrop the Telegraph & Argus these days.

Hot on the heels of the hit film Fairytale - a True Story, in which the scriptwriters couldn't resist including this paper, comes a novel which also gives us an affectionate role.

Strictly speaking, Bradford-born Peter Haigh has not made his native city the setting for this book about the dramas on and off the screen at an old-fashioned cinema called the Picture Palace.

He has fictionalised it as Bradchester and, similarly, the T&A is thinly disguised as the Argus.

In his novel, the Argus plays a key role in helping the cinema fight for survival in the 1960s, publicising a campaign to halt plans for its demolition.

Perhaps it is hardly surprising that the novelist gives a prominent part to the local paper in Picture Palace - he actually began his working life in the advertising department at Bradford & District Newspapers during the war before going on to be the editor of the monthly magazine ABC Film Review.

Picture Palace is divided into seven chapters which Haigh nostalgically calls "reels" - his father was a cinema projectionist - each of which represents a distinctly different era in the 50-year span of the book.

By the end, in 1977, even those who love the old Picture Palace have recognised that its days are numbered. Haigh recalls how part of his real-life job with the T&A as a youngster was to collect advertising copy for the paper from the city's cinemas - more than 40 of them.

But things have changed drastically since the heyday of the cinemas and his novel charts their downfall as they succumb one by one to closure or conversion into bingo halls.

Haigh does strike an optimistic note, however, as he recounts the Picture Palace's fate.

Those old enough to remember the proliferation of cinemas in Bradford - or, no doubt, countless other similar towns and cities - in the post-war years before television took hold, will recognise many of the author's descriptions.

"I have drawn to some degree on experiences I actually had in the distant past," he says.

"For example, the dressing of the foyer of the eponymous Picture Palace in the style of a jungle may sound ludicrous by today's standards but it's based on what I actually saw at the St George's Hall when it was a cinema and was showing a Tarzan film."

The comments of Old Man Isley, the retired Argus theatre correspondent who is roped in to lead a campaign to save the Picture Palace from demolition to make way for road improvements, will also ring true for Bradfordians who witnessed the sweeping changes the city underwent in the 1960s.

"The fools are tearing down gems of architecture and replacing them with glass and concrete monstrosities," says the retired journalist at one point.

"Going forward, they call it. Going back, say I."

Haigh now lives in London. I was left with the impression that it would pain him to come back.

Simon Ashberry

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.