To begin with, though, the word ‘film’ did trail a certain glamour and mystery, and film acting seemed a subtler and altogether more calculated business than the acting I’d done on stage or on television. In retrospect, this seems absurd. The first filming I ever did was in Lloyd George Knew My Father (1965), a short film for television directed by Jack Gold. It starred John Bird, John Fortune and Eleanor Bron, with all of whom I was at that time regularly working on television … and on live television, too, which, if I’d thought about it, was a much more daunting process than film. At least on film you could have several goes at it (and didn’t need to know more than a few lines at a time). But it was the word ‘film’ that threw me into panic. It seemed so adult, whereas television was just playing about and being silly.

By the time I got round to writing films this sense of awe had long since gone, and when I did come to write a film it was almost without realising it. The first two television plays that I wrote, A Day Out (1972) and Sunset Across the Bay (1974), were done on location and on film, and to this day I don’t know whether to call them plays or films. They were only television films, it’s true, and in those days people working in feature films were quite condescending about television … but when I did eventually graduate to writing the occasional feature film there didn’t seem to be all that much difference anyway. The techniques were the same (though probably not the film stock), as were the personnel and even the food. It’s true feature filming was slower and more finicky, and the baggage train of vans, trucks and caravans more cumbersome, but this was presumably because feature filming was more expensive than filming for television and less routine. Certainly the fees were more generous; the actors were paid more; the writer was paid more; everyone, probably, was paid more. But it was hard not to wonder if this was one of the reasons why tempers on feature films were generally shorter: there was more at stake.

Certainly on my first feature film, A Private Function, there was more interference from the producers (to the general detriment of the film) than I’d ever experienced in a decade of making television films for the BBC. Scenes were cut without consultation, the budget was slashed, the score made jokier: all the usual weary litany of complaints film-makers have about ‘the money’. One of the producers was Denis O’Brien, the other George Harrison, and I never worked with either of them again. Experience in the world of entertainment is simply a list of people you would be happy to find yourself working with and another list of those you never want to see again; with luck the first list is longer than the second.