There are certain truths about half term that nobody puts on the poster. One is that ten days with no school run can feel, by day four, roughly as long as a geological era. The other is that Vue Swindon appears to understand this, because its new line-up of family films looks less like a cinema schedule and more like a rescue mission.
Two brand new animated features arrive on 23 October. Monster Mia follows a twelve year old who turns out to be the only human at a school full of monsters, and Wildwood, from the studio behind Coraline, sends a girl called Prue into an enchanted forest to find her brother. They join Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, in which Shaun's attempt to save a ruined pumpkin patch somehow produces a missing farmer and a beast loose in the woods, and PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, which involves a volcano, an island and a familiar amount of shouting from a small dog in a helicopter. There is also a Disney Junior Cinema Club for the very young, and Mighty Mornings tickets at £2.49 if booked online, which is cheaper than most things that keep a child quiet for ninety minutes.
In theory, this is simply a cinema doing seasonal programming. In practice, it is a council estimated six weeks before Christmas during which an entire town will go looking for somewhere, anything, with dimmed lighting and a locked door.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had been taken by her granddaughter to see one of the new films and had not entirely followed the plot, on account of a child explaining it to her throughout in a whisper that carried four rows. 'In my day the pictures were one and six and you sat still,' she said. 'Now it's eighteen pound for the family and the child provides a running commentary free of charge.'
Vue has not, to be fair, marketed any of this as respite care. The press release speaks of families coming together to enjoy brilliant stories on the big screen, which is true, provided you do not examine too closely what some of those families are actually doing during the ninety minutes of darkness, which is mainlining a large coffee and briefly forgetting their own surname.
By the time PAW Patrol's volcano erupts on screen, at least one parent in the auditorium will have achieved something closer to inner peace than they have managed all half term. Whether the pups save the island is, frankly, a secondary concern.
Shaun the Sheep, meanwhile, remains blissfully unaware he has been drafted into Swindon's parental support services. He declined to comment, being a sheep, and busy.