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. 20th 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 20th 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.

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