I have never been very good at ‘serious’.  ‘Grown-up’ films and television series are a real problem for me.  My attention span is that of an ADHD goldfish.  Paranormal horror keeps me awake at night; gore makes me nauseous and I experience the hot-under-the-collar discomfort of all British men of my age when confronted with on-screen sex of any kind.  At the very best I have to turn the sound off.  I can manage ‘Action’ movies as long as they are not too demanding – and probably more importantly – not too loud.  (It always seems to me that the volume of the special effects is in direct inverse proportion to that of the dialogue.)  Indiana Jones, Star Wars, earlier James Bond – the latter ones require far too much attention – probably mark the limits of my Action threshold.  My Refresh Rate is not what it was.

What this means is that I am not the kind of man that goes to the cinema too often these days: I can just about manage comedy and Disney (although, in my mid-sixties, I have to persuade a grandchild to come with me to the latter if I am not to appear unseemly).  Comedy, it goes without saying, is not what it was, occurring now in only one of two forms: the gross-out or the rom-com.  I really can’t get to grips with the gross-out – I have been a male teenager and it wasn’t funny even at the time – but I have developed a grudging affection for rom-com, without which I fear I would be petitioning Pixar for a release date for Toy Story 5 and camping outside the Chief Executive’s office in a Woody mask yelling ‘There’s a snake in my boot!’ at anyone brave enough to wander past without cackling something indecipherable into a walkie-talkie, throwing me through the door and using my ribs as a xylophone.  I am a man who sought comedic solace in the Johnny English films for goodness sake, and I am not proud of it.

In today’s cinema it would appear that there is no com without rom and, if I’m honest, it has affected my whole viewing experience.  I am totally incapable of watching anything without pairing people up, be they a febrile mess of confused neurons or a neatly packaged string of geek-generated pixels.  Everything I watch I treat like some kind of public participation Speed Dating event.  All I ever really hope for is a reasonable com to rom ratio.  When it works, it works: When Harry Met Sally, almost anything by Richard Curtis, anything starring Simon Pegg, Crocodile Dundee… comedy can withstand years.  Cars age, clothes age, attitudes change but funny can endure.

If I choose to review my favourite comedy films, I find that the list accords, more or less, with everybody else’s: Monty Python (Holy Grail & Life of Brian), Airplane, Blazing Saddles, Duck Soup, Annie Hall, The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Pink Panther...  (You may notice that there is nothing here produced since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Perhaps there is no comedy without rickets.)  My list does differ from most of those I have read in that it does not include Dr Strangelove, but I was very young when I saw it for the first time and it scared the sh*t out of me.  I have never fully recovered.)  I have a particular soft spot for late nineties English comedies such as the sublime Brassed Off and Full Monty but there is so little to drag me away from vintage Columbo and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads on TV now that I fear I may never visit the cinema again, which is a shame because you can never quite reproduce the experience of being bored witless by a film whilst sitting behind someone three feet taller than yourself, having a very loud conversation with a similarly proportioned partner as they eat nachos and suck Coca Cola through something that sounds like a bilge pump, now can you?…