Low cost lighting

Lighting on a budget appeals to me, as does an elegant engineering solution to a technical problem.

There aren’t many village halls with a fixed lighting rig. Those few which have a couple of front-of-house spotlights generally run them bare, by which I mean that the light coming out of the lens is in its natural state, what we might call “white”.

Whoever thought about how to add colour to the old lamp pictured below must have been a worthy addition to any amateur production team. Apart from offering a choice of four colours (five if you also count white), this lighting designer has used standard brass curtain track and runners, the kind that screeched loudly when my grandmother wanted small boys to get up in the morning.

Full marks to the Owermoigne village hall crew, for ingenuity, craft and thrift.