One of the best things I ever did was fail all but two of my GCE ‘O’ levels. Meant I escaped the dismal institution I’d done a five year learning stretch in, and got to do some retakes at a much more egalitarian technical college, before leaving there with enough passes to go to a quality sixth form college.

The sixth form was a beacon of light in a conservative area, an excellent model of how to give young people a liberal education and enough experience of independence that it’d match where they were in their late teens emotionally. It also meant that it functioned as a great place to ready yourself for further education, or the world of work, depending on what you had in mind when you spread your wings after A levels.

A number of factors at sixth form served to prepare me well for the idea that I could write films years later, though at the time the nearest I managed was some scribbling in inky fanzines. One was that teachers there, as well as teaching their regular A level classes, also did a weekly session in which they shared one of their passions with students. You could do anything from bee keeping to astronomy, and one of the extra classes I remember making an impact was on film appreciation. Each week, we’d watch a sequence from a film, and discuss how the way it was made affected you as a viewer.

It was nothing heavy — one week, I recall, we watched a chunk of Escape from Alcatraz, realising how the photography made the prison so imposing. What made this possible was the appearance of the video recorder, which by the time I’m talking about — the early 80s — was ubiquitous enough that many people had one at home.

One of those people was Mike Ward. A fellow sixth form student, it was Mike’s house we piled round to on afternoons off from college. It became quite a ritual, and a gang of us watched videos at his on a regular basis. Escape from New York, screened last night on ITV4, was one favourite. It pressed all the buttons for that mostly-male crew, what with being an action science fiction yarn that could have sprung from the pages of 2000AD, which several of us were reading. And Mike himself was a connoisseur of genre films; I can remember him making jokes about the length of credit sequences in John Carpenter films, and circulating the information that Carpenter himself did everything from write the things to compose their soundtracks. Again, VHS is to thank for this knowledge, rather than any formal film education — Mike knew these things because he watched the films before and after we watched them as a group, and some of what he saw stuck.

We didn’t just watch action hokum though. We watched Hong Kong action hokum, Mike having got into Jackie Chan early and with more enthusiasm than the rest of us could muster. The definitive film of that time though remains Flash Gordon, which we viewed innumerable times and was our very own cult classic. Never mind Rocky Horror Picture Show (though we enjoyed that too), the essence of camp for me is Brian Blessed’s performance as the King of the Hawkmen. And watching it lots of times — I dread to think how many — gave me an appreciation of details of the filmmaker’s art and led, along with the consumption of cannabis purchased from whoever it was who supplied such things then, to some fascinating theories about the film. All good stuff for activating bits of the brain interested in how films function.

Naturally, it couldn’t last. We were due to go our separate ways — and those sessions at Mike’s place helped prepare us for that. When it came to filling in the forms you had to complete to send off to universities, there was a section for stuff of note, like whether you’d swam the channel for charity. None of us had done that — but we’d all spent a lot of time at Mike’s place watching cool films. And thus the Dorridge Film and Video Society was born. We all got to be officers of the club, ensuring that we all had a position of responsibility representing our commitment to watching VHS genre films in a marijuana haze. I was Secretary, and I’m sure that made the difference to my eventual destination as a student when it came to doing a degree.