WHEREVER I’ve gone this week, people have stopped me and asked me about my judgement – not whether we should be in or out of the EU, but whether they should buy tickets to see Kynren.

I had the privilege on Saturday night of sitting through the dress rehearsal in the new “tribune”, which has been built on a derelict golf course in Bishop Auckland on the banks of the Wear.

Kynren is based on the French theme park Puy de Fou, which attracts 2.5m visitors a year, and it was there, when I was directed to my seat in the main grandstand, that I had my first encounter with the word the “tribune” as a viewing area. Now Bishop has a tribune, too.

Appropriately for a historical show which begins with Roman chariots racing around and centurions carrying flaming torches, “tribune” is a Latin word. A “tribunus” was the head of a tribe, and the tribune was a person chosen to protect the interests and rights of the ordinary people from the ruling classes above them.

At public meetings, the tribune sat on a raised chair, to show that he was head and shoulders above everyone else, and he would pass judgement on the proceedings.

The idea of a raised chair continued when Roman times ended. Any platform from which a judgement was passed or a speech was delivered could be called a tribune, and particularly in continental cathedrals, a bishop sat in his throne on a tribune, presenting his sermon from the nearby pulpit.

Often the bishop was flanked by other clerics, so you could have quite a few people high on a tribune looking down on the others, and it was this arrangement that a horserace-goer in the late 18th Century must have remembered when he saw the first grandstand.

So you can find tribunes at sports grounds – Le Mans and the Tour de France are also watched from tribunes – as well as in churches and cathedrals, and often you form an opinion or make a judgement on a tribune. This makes the new tribune at Bishop Auckland doubly appropriate, and my view from the tribune was that Kynren is a hugely memorable show with a truly epic ending.

In my judgement, you should pray for a dry, dark night and go.

DARLINGTON’S first cinema for 75 years opened yesterday, which has caused me to grapple with another French word. “Cinematographe” was coined by a French inventor, Leon Bouly, in 1892, by ramming a couple of Greek words together to form something vaguely appropriate for what he was trying to do.

A “graph”, be it photo or seismo or cardio, records or writes something, and “kinema” means “motion”, so a cinematographe is something that is “written in movement”.

Many French inventors were trying experiments with moving pictures at the same time, and they called their apparatus cyclographe, or phonoscope, or kinetoscope or even zoopraxiscope. Just think, any of those words could have caught on – “do you fancy a night at the new zoopraxi in Feethams?” – but in 1894, Monsieur Bouly ran into money difficulties and sold his cinematographic patents to the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis.

They liked the new word and applied it to their process of projecting a rapid succession of photographs onto a screen to reproduce a moving scene, and so the cinema was born.