I love films or as our American cousins say, movies.

The Movies.

There is something entirely magical about those two words. When I hear them, I don't just think of the object that is the movie (I do actually prefer that word - it is somehow less static than 'film'), I think about the locations, the actors, the scenery, the director, the producer, the editing, the music and, of course, the screenplay.

Like many people of my age, if I wasn't out playing football on a Saturday afternoon, I was glued to BBC2 watching a black and white film - James Stewart, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart - and I would be absolutely lost in what was before me. I think I understood film before I understood anything else in life, partly because it was an escape from reality and partly because I knew that there was more to what I was seeing than was simply projected upon the screen before me.

My mother worked in the cinema in Bracknell when I was a boy, an old ABC. There was a projectionist who, to my young mind, was quite scary, called Chief. I’m sure he was a delight, my mother liked him, but he had Marty Feldman eyes and thick glasses and was doubled over by a hunch. To my young eyes he was a bit Hammer horror. However, and this is where Chief’s good heart shines out, he would let me in the projection room while the film was running and it was like being among the Gods; the reels of film, the projectors, the smell, a cross between chemicals and the mustiness of an aged room, all hit my senses like cocaine. I loved the movies before my mother worked there. I loved them infinitely more once I had trod hallowed ground. In those days, cinemas had all sorts of offers for kids, freebies to give away, just for turning up, so I got all of those before anyone else. I also got to be in the auditorium on my own, before anybody else was let in. I can still remember the smell, the old flip-down, flip-up seats, the red curtain across the screen, the art deco lights upon the walls, the semi-light, the sound of my feet as they echoed upon the thinly carpeted floor as I ran between seats and up and down the aisles. I am a big James Bond fan and I got to see Diamonds are forever eight times for free when it came there. Even though it is a very weak entry in the series, I still love it and it is probably the Bond film that I have watched the most, undoubtedly because of the Bracknell ABC.

I think that the Bracknell cinema simply reinforced an adoration that was already there.

I have always, since I was a kid, scribbled down mini-screenplays. My first one, you will be unsurpised to hear, was a James Bond script. It took hours. Sadly, my mother put a ton and a half of damp washing on it and it became a feathery blob, it was written in felt pen, unreadable and lost forever.

My writing in the end veered towards fiction and non-fiction and screenplays became a vicarious pleasure. When I watch a film, I love to see the techniques used, the editing, so vital, the direction, the interpretation of the script by the actors and the script itself.

So, things go full circle and I find myself again in the land of screenplays, another string to my bow, another 'art' to practice again and again and again...