The man is clearly very proud of the musical output of his hometown. Skinny jeans and a pair of scuffed, red Adidas trainers complete his look. I imagine he would be donning a green parka if the room wasn’t so cramped and sweltering hot. He introduces himself as Neil.

‘Tell us how this happened,’ states Tom.

‘What d’ya mean?’ Neil replies in his thick Mancunian accent.

‘I mean, how the fuck did a snuff movie make it onto the screen?’ Tom retorts, his voice raised.

‘A snuff movie?’ Neil repeats, looking bemused. ‘No, you don’t honestly think that was real, do you?’

‘You don’t?

Neil shakes his head so fast that it is in danger of snapping off his neck and swinging into orbit.

‘Not at all, he’s known for this kind of stuff. He’s always pulling pranks and making films like this. Seriously, a lot of them are on YouTube, you should look them up. My favourite is the one where he drives off a cliff.’

He laughs at the memory of the film but stops abruptly when he sees our faces.

‘The crowd didn’t seem to think that it was fake, how are you so sure it is?’ I ask, and for the first time he turns to me and studies me intently.

His dark brown eyes rake me up and down, and I notice that his cool, calm demeanour might be an act, as I notice the beads of sweat on his forehead, though that could be down to the humidity in the room.

‘I’m a film student and last year, one of the modules we had to do was marketing. It was pretty much a study of his publicity campaigns. Honestly, he does this kind of thing all the time.’

He stands up and pulls a laptop out of a drawer. I look at it enquiringly and he explains that when he has set the film up on the projector, he uses that time to work. He sits down again and opens the lid of the laptop. His fingers glide over the buttons and he looks pointedly at the screen with his tongue poking out between his front teeth. He taps a few more times and then turns the laptop around so that Tom and I can see it.

‘And this is…?’ Tom says.

‘This is a list of all the things Reuben has done for a bit of publicity, specifically during promotion for a film or TV show he has been involved in. He’s been doing it since his debut film. My tutor sent us this to help with our essay on marketing, and how Reuben used this technique so effectively.’

I take the laptop from him and have a look at the list. It is a humorous list, and proves that Reuben has had good ideas to cause a bit of a stir in order to promote his work. But most of these are funny, light hearted ideas designed to capture the public’s imagination. They are certainly not in keeping with a strangulation video.