IT'S always a shame when a worthwhile event is thinly attended. It was doubly so yesterday for the launch of a short season of classic silent movies with live music, written and conducted by Carl Davis. In family terms, there was much more than the matinee showing of the film itself: from popcorn and hot dogs, to Keystone Cops in period gear chasing a bad guy around the corridors of the concert hall, to clowns and balloons, to piano rag music played live in the foyer. And, though it wasn't exactly what we'd bargained for, there was also a short first half to the programme, where the Dutch jazz band - the 11-piece Willem Breuker Kollektiev - that was to provide the pastiche period music to the film first entertained in their own right with an astonishingly versatile set of numbers that ranged across the jazz idioms, from boogie to Latin to abrasive contemporary styles, taking in some theatrical

nonsense en route.

The film itself - a poignant and gently comic creation where Harold Lloyd, with grandiose dreams about becoming a heroic and popular figure, is mocked and pilloried as the fool at college before, in a final, glorious rush of fantasy, achieving his aspirations - is jam-packed with wonderful cameo scenes: none better than the extended episode at the college charity ball where Lloyd is fitted up with a comprehensively-disintegrating tuxedo.

Superbly titled, with captions that raised as many laughs as the action, the film burst into life with Davis's brilliant score, which embraced every topical genre from Sousa marches to romantic Gershwin, and a host of twenties references. Do not miss the next matinee, a Chaplin double bill on June 21.