For the last couple of months, I've been traveling round the country shooting my new documentary. Last time I made one, I didn't really have an interview technique. I just let people talk. Let them tell me their story. I still do this to a large degree but having spent...

Nostalgia is a funny thing. A dull yearning for times past. Life is speeding up these days, technological progress accelerates and drags us barely-developed apes along for the ride, screaming, howling and appreciating the sudden proliferation of free pornography. The future is uncertain, that's scary and yet, if we look...

I've spent the last few weeks vociferously defending the BBC to all who would hear and pointing out that the failings they are being accused of and ripping themselves to shreds over in a downward spiral of defiantly proper behaviour, are barely significant in the world of modern media. What...

It's not been easy for us children of the 80s, you know? Everything that was presented to us as wholesome, decent and magical - tartrazine, the Sun, Jimmy Savile... have been revealed to be actually properly evil.

Even the movies we grew up with have been turned on their...

This morning, I was offered the chance to help one of my favourite Hollywood film directors bring my favourite comic book to the big screen in an incredible-looking animated style and voiced by two of my favourite character actors of all time (one of which, Clancy Brown, played my favourite...

Did I ever tell you how much I hate education?

No? Well, that's probably because I don't. How could I? Education is the answer to every single problem in the world. The broadening of understanding, the acquisition, exchange and challenging of wisdom. What's not to like? Well... OK, there is...

It's a real shame to have to take a fellow HuffPost UK blogger to task, to smear their reputation and jeopardise the united front of film bloggery on this site. But I must. For Charlotte Skeoch's recent article 'The Anti-Fright Fest Campaign for Hugs, Not Horror' had me reading through...

In my first year of film school, now an uncomprehendable 17 years ago, I went with some friends to see Toy Story on its first weekend of release. As a bunch of cocky late-teenage wannabe auteurs, kids films were perhaps the only the genre of movie we weren't consuming rabidly....

I've grown to hate Don Letts.

Don't get me wrong, I've long forgiven and, as much as possible, forgotten the output of Big Audio Dynamite and I would never belittle his contribution to punk of the introduction of reggae. I'm just sick of his sunglasses-indoors-bedecked face cropping up every...

I love London. Let me be very clear about that. I love it. I always have. From childhood visits to Covent Garden, the Barbican and, the dearly missed Museum of the Moving Image, to teenage gallivants round galleries and gigs, to dodgy parties in dodgy far-flung boroughs as a young...

Sometimes it's only through the study of historical documents that we can truly appreciate how, societally we find ourselves locked into certain modes of behaviour. Recent medical reports have identified a 20 year identifiable rise in sexually transmitted diseases. The latest government statistics tell us that in the last two...

As a 30-something music fan, it's pretty easy to feel disheartened these days. It's not that there is a shortage of good music, not at all - home recording and internet distribution has provided us with riches unimaginable but the fall out of this is a very fractured landscape in...

Let me tell you something, I love money. I LOVE IT. Not spending it, you understand, but making it, keeping it, having it. I also love to lend it. Love to lend money. Not as any kind of philanthropic gesture. Oh no. It's business. Business, you see. Lending money gives...

It's funny how, as one species on one planet, we're keen to segregate. We now have seemingly limitless criteria at our disposal to create increasingly arbitrary factions to either define ourselves or denigrate others. I've never been much of a patriot because, frankly... I don't get it.

I don't...

I really like those blogs/articles/speeches/songs which begin with the author recounting a character-defining piece of knowledge which was passed on to them from their father. Those are great. Wisdom passed down from generation to generation. Maybe I like it so much because I've never really experienced it. I didn't grow...

1982. Things aren't great in Britain.

The Falklands war is in full swing. Unemployment has exceeded 3,000,000 for the first time since the 1930s. 1200 of those jobs are lost from the Round Oak Steelworks in the West Midlands and this is just the start of things to come...

I love the BBC.

I will gladly fight anybody who calls for its dismantling or questions its pedigree. I will gasp at a Doctor Who slur, rebuff a Blue Peter insult and smack down a Monty Python dismissal (although, equally, there's nothing more annoying than a Monty Python enthusiast...

Steve Martin has made some really bad choices, hasn't he? It's been more than 20 years since he convincingly knocked it out of the park and although there has been the occasional blip in his downward trajectory (I guess I'm just talking about Bowfinger), it has generally been two decades...

So, we finally have a road map to saving the British film industry. The culture minister Ed Vaizey commissioned it, Lord Chris Smith chaired the panel that produced it and I shall now pooh-pooh it. That's my involvement. Just doing my bit.

You're probably a busy person who might not...