THE sudden closure of Accrington's new and only cinema less than a year after opening is not only a shock and a pity, it may also be an X-rated horror for council tax payers.

For while the operators, Somerset-based GSX Leisure Ltd have gone into liquidation with debts approaching £100,000 and are blaming high rent charges and low ticket sales at the town's Viaduct Centre where their four-screen Premiere cinema complex was based, they are not the only ones to get their fingers burned.

That is because a lot of public money went into this project.

Hyndburn Council has a one-third stake in Globe Enterprises which owns the site and borrowed a seven-figure sum for the £3.5 million Viaduct development - a loan secured on the strength of a 25-year contract with a London-based firm called Metroplex, originally due to run the complex.

Detailed commercial and financial checks were made into the company. But it sold its interest in the new cinema to GSX before it opened last November. Now it seems GSX was not vetted as thoroughly.

If so, why not? - above all when so much public money was at stake and when this venture was being handed over to a company which, it transpires, had no previous experience of running cinemas.

Just what checks were made into GSX's background? The public deserves an answer.