I’m Not Even Sup­posed To Be Here Today: The Video Shop at the End of the World

Nes­tled halfway up the Christ­mas Steps in the heart of Bris­tol lies one of the UK’s last DVD rental shops. 20^th Cen­tu­ry Flicks is home to around 21,000 films across mul­ti­ple for­mats, plus two tiny pri­vate hire cin­e­mas, and it’s a space I know well – I’ve worked there for almost sev­en years.

Flicks was opened in Red­land, Bris­tol in 1982, but the vast film col­lec­tion quick­ly out­grew the shop, and for­mer own­er Nigel Sell­man moved it to Rich­mond Ter­race, Clifton, where it remained until late 2014. After a sig­nif­i­cant rent increase forced the shop out, it moved to its cur­rent home. While this was hap­pen­ing, in the late 2000s and ear­ly 2010s, video shops began to close en masse, spurred on by the rise of stream­ing plat­forms and the 2008 finan­cial crash.

While the shop is gen­er­al­ly described by staff as a cross between Clerks, Empire Records, and Black Books, I was ini­tial­ly drawn to the shop as a teenag­er because of its par­al­lels with Cab­in Pres­sure, a Radio 4 sit­com about a tiny char­ter air­line. Cab­in Pres­sure is ground­ed by the ever-present fear that this organ­i­sa­tion which shouldn’t be able to exist would hit insol­ven­cy. Hav­ing grown up with it, Flicks felt instant­ly familiar.

My rela­tion­ship to Flicks is com­plex – it’s a shop that I work at, a weird, colour­ful film cave with almost no nat­ur­al light, and a mas­sive part of my iden­ti­ty. It’s always been here as a slight­ly over­stim­u­lat­ing anchor when I’ve moved house across (and more recent­ly out of) the city. My cur­rent lack of reg­u­lar job in Lon­don com­bined with my inabil­i­ty to mean­ing­ful­ly extract myself from Flicks mean that I am still clock­ing in a few shifts a month. Sort of like the Hotel Cal­i­for­nia of the cus­tomer ser­vice indus­try, it seems I can check out, but may nev­er leave.

I sat down to dis­cuss all things video shop with Flicks’ cur­rent own­er Dave Tay­lor. It’s Oscars night, and we are prepar­ing for a late-night watch par­ty. We are drink­ing small tum­blers of a Welsh beer called But­ty Bach (lit­tle friend) which I have just spilled uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly all over the shop’s laserdisc col­lec­tion. (Laserdiscs, for the unini­ti­at­ed, are a vinyl-sized, defunct 90s media for­mat that look like dou­ble sided DVDs. We have sev­er­al hun­dred of them for some reason.)

Dave has worked at Flicks since 2003, and sees him­self as the some­times unwit­ting cus­to­di­an of one of the biggest DVD col­lec­tions in the coun­try. The shop’s con­tin­u­a­tion into the 2020s is large­ly down to his abil­i­ty to save mon­ey through the prac­ti­cal skills required to fix things such as bro­ken win­dows and lights, and build things such as counter-tops and cinemas.

Flicks’ home­made nature con­tributes to its unusu­al atmos­phere; aes­thet­i­cal­ly it is rem­i­nis­cent of a type of inde­pen­dent shop that is increas­ing­ly hard to come by in the UK, due most­ly to extor­tion­ate rent prices. The shop is gen­er­al­ly posi­tioned with­in its semi-fre­quent media appear­ances as a bea­con of hope, weath­er­ing the storm of neolib­er­al­ism. I under­stand this, but also take issue with it. For part­ly gen­er­a­tional rea­sons, I think the shop is best described as ​“just vibing”.

I put this to Dave, strug­gling to explain what I mean, short of ​“vib­ing” being a catch-all term for exist­ing. He doesn’t get it, but being a sup­port­ive friend, tries his best to work with it. Explain­ing the need for con­stant adapt­abil­i­ty in the shop, Dave tells me that ​“we’re just ​‘vib­ing’ under­ground until we hit an obsta­cle that isn’t move­able, at which point the myceli­um shoots up mush­rooms – you’re doing this thing until some­thing forces you to change.”

Through his myceli­um lens, the move to Christ­mas Steps, and cre­ation of the shop’s pri­vate hire microcin­e­mas rep­re­sent mush­room growth. It’s a bit of a weird anal­o­gy, but a nice way to look at the shop’s grad­ual evo­lu­tion. The rest of our chat is less of a suc­cess, and we aban­don the inter­view in favour of mop­ping up the rest of the But­ty Bach and prepar­ing the shop for Jonathan Ross’ Oscars insights.

Daisy and Dave pic­tured in 20^th Cen­tu­ry Flicks, July 2023

For years I have tied myself in knots try­ing to fig­ure out what Flicks is. I under­stand it as a mix­ture of work­place, archive, and cul­tur­al odd­i­ty, but strug­gle to put my fin­ger on why I am frus­trat­ed with it being framed as a bea­con of hope for inde­pen­dent busi­ness­es, when it’s some­thing I some­times find myself think­ing too. I inter­rupt­ed these mus­ings with a quick trip to Paris.

Dur­ing my short vis­it, I made a bee­line for the near­est video shop, Le Vidéo Club de la Butte in Mont­martre. I was hav­ing a weird day, as I had just received an email telling me that my Eurostar back home was can­celled because of an unex­plod­ed World War Two bomb hav­ing been found near the train sta­tion in Paris, anoth­er sit­com sit­u­a­tion so bizarre that I couldn’t quite believe I had found myself in it.

The shop is beau­ti­ful, filled to the brim with DVD cas­es, film posters and the smell of cig­a­rette smoke. Chat­ting to a cus­tomer, I was sur­prised to dis­cov­er that there are still a fair few video shops in France’s major cities, includ­ing a sec­ond in Paris. The rise of stream­ing has obvi­ous­ly hap­pened in France as much as the UK, so these shops strug­gle, but are seem­ing­ly buoyed up by local com­mu­ni­ties who val­ue their con­tin­ued longevity.

Think­ing about this on my train to Nantes (240 miles south west of Paris, birth­place of Jacques Demy, and my insane solu­tion to get­ting back to the UK) I text Dave, explain­ing my sur­prise at France hav­ing con­sid­er­ably more than the UK’s three or four sur­viv­ing video shops, and that my work­ing hypoth­e­sis is this being down in part to dif­fer­ing cul­tur­al atti­tudes. ​“You might’ve hit on some­thing there that I hadn’t realised,” Dave responds. ​“Spend­ing time in France in my 20s and see­ing their work-life bal­ance and the com­mu­ni­ty vibe their shops have made a huge impres­sion on me. Won­der if that’s what I was aim­ing for with Flicks.”

In Flicks’s Parisian coun­ter­part, cus­tomers of the shop seemed focussed main­ly on rent­ing DVDs. While Flicks does of course have an earnest­ly engaged cus­tomer base, it is, espe­cial­ly at week­ends, matched by vis­i­tors who are enthralled by the shop’s scruffy aes­thet­ic and aston­ished that ​“places like this still exist.” The French con­nec­tion helped me get to grips with why I describe Flicks as just vib­ing: in oppo­si­tion to its treat­ment as nov­el­ty item first and work­ing shop second.

Despite the shop’s sit­com poten­tial, a lot of its ins and outs are typ­i­cal­ly mun­dane. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of times I’ve been faced with a stack of DVDs to add to the inter­nal sys­tem and con­sid­ered hid­ing them to avoid the min­i­mal amount of work required. There is a leak above the kitchen com­ing from the flat above, and every time it rains the floor floods a lit­tle bit, which has been hap­pen­ing as long as I’ve worked there.

This is not to say that it isn’t a very cool job, and indeed shop (it obvi­ous­ly is) but that, like Paris, the cul­tur­al­ly roman­ti­cised ver­sion of Flicks dis­solves on con­tact with air (or French peo­ple, con­text depen­dent). At Flicks, we are often found mop­ping leaks or sweep­ing pop­corn, drink­ing tea or wine.

My favourite line from Clerks is the oft quot­ed ​“I’m not even sup­posed to be here today.” I once wrote it on the front of a t‑shirt with a sharpie for a talk Dave and I gave about the shop, and it’s been my Insta­gram bio for sev­er­al years. Flicks isn’t even sup­posed to be here today, but, for a mul­ti­tude of rea­sons, is. Despite the leaky ceil­ing and gen­er­al insta­bil­i­ty of the UK home enter­tain­ment indus­try, we’re still out here, just vibing.

20^th Cen­tu­ry Flicks is locat­ed at 19 Christ­mas Steps, Bris­tol, but in the UK you can also rent from them by post.