The "on-off" saga of Barnsley's proposed multi-plex cinema has been a long one, and as it was announced this week that once again the project has been put on hold, we spoke to Barnsley Council to find out what exactly is going on.
"It's all about jobs" said Max Beta, Barnsley Council's head of Entertainment and Technology. "Quite simply, the pirate-video sector in Barnsley is just too big; opening the new cinema would put too many jobs at risk.
"We hoped to go ahead with the project in 2014 when the demand for VHS started to wain, but to our dismay the call for low-quality pirated DVD's went through the roof and an entire industry was revitalised.
"It comes down to economics", Mr Beta went onto explain. "Although we can't directly tax the income generated by pirate-DVD's, studies have proven that the entire revenue stream is spent on beer, which we can tax at a rate of 83%. This is why we forced HMV to close - they were unwanted competition".
It is unclear at this stage whether the cinema will ever go ahead, though Mr Beta predicts the most likely time to see it come to fruition will be around 2025 when Blu-rays - which are notoriously more difficult to copy than DVD's - become popular.
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