A QUICK-thinking staff member of the Ritz Cinema in Burnham prevented the attempted theft of a laptop and returned it to its owner on Sunday.

The laptop had been accidentally left propped up against a car in Victoria Street by Purple Watkins after his partner Gypsy had performed at the town’s Civic Service.

Richard Hodgkinson, 33, a supervisor at the cinema, could see the car from work and noticed a woman picking up the laptop and walk away with it.

Richard said: “I went outside and told her I knew whose laptop it was and that I’d keep hold of it in the cinema until he came back.

“As I got hold of it she started getting a bit agressive so I just took the laptop off her and went inside.

“I wrote a note and left it on Purple’s car telling him where the laptop was and you could tell he was really relieved to have it back after hearing what had happened.”

A grateful Purple told the Weekly News: “This sort of thing restores your faith a bit.

“It just makes me feel really thankful that we live in a community where people are willing to look out for each other.

“It’s not so much the monetary value of the laptop but it’s all the things that we have stored on it.

“We have all of Gypsy’s backing music on there and we’d be lost without that.”