I can’t remember what my earliest job title was, back on Divider – as I say, today it would be ‘intern’ but back then, only a fraction more than a decade ago, it was ‘junior editor’ or ‘features assistant’ or similar, and paid actual money. Which was welcome, because the role included one of the most hated tasks in the office: gathering ‘vox pops’ for a page on which ‘normal people’ (like you and me!) said what DVD release they were most looking forward to. I would go to Covent Garden, or Brent Cross, or Camden Lock, with a photographer and we would accost people. No one wanted to know. I got told to fuck off more times than I can count – bright points of human contact in otherwise total invisibility. Naturally the magazine was only interested in pleasant-looking people aged eighteen to thirty-five, because those were the only people that advertisers were interested in, so a lot of people were invisible to us as well. Of the small minority who did meet the demographic requirements and who did stop to talk about DVDs, many had inadequate English, or were keen to explain that Hollywood was SATAN’S REALM, or they wanted to show off about going to see a Todd Solondz film in the 1990s. Respondents willing and able to answer our questions mostly didn’t have the slightest idea about what was about to come out on DVD. (Think about it – do you?) Eventually we started taking out a cheat sheet, a list of prominent releases due in the next couple of months, to jog memories and maybe prompt some useful answers. All this work to produce a dozen headshots and priceless insights such as ‘Can’t wait for The Polar Express!’