‘The Billings verdict’: Kine Weekly and the British Box Office, 1936–62

Abstract

This article analyses the annual surveys of the British box office compiled by chief film reviewer R. H. (‘Josh’) Billings for the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly between 1936 and 1962. Billings's surveys, known as the ‘Book of Form’, came to be accepted as an authoritative guide to the performance of films at the British box office despite the absence of any actual revenue figures. The article considers how the ‘Book of Form’ was compiled and compares it to various archival sources that provide hard evidence of film revenues in Britain. It concludes that, despite some anomalies, the ‘Billings verdict’ provides a broadly accurate overall summary of the ‘winners’ at the British box office over a period of a quarter of a century.