A few years ago, a filmmaker I know was invited to participate in a celebratory evening to congratulate the local Film Council franchise on the wisdom of their investments in local projects. He and his colleague got up to pay heartfelt tribute for the support they’d received, and it made for a touching spectacle as clips from the film were shown while the director talked about the journey from concept to completion.

What is wrong with the picture described? Let’s start with the fact that the regional screen agency had precisely nothing to do with the film in question. Oh, its maker was a squash buddy of one of the big cheeses at the agency, but they had put zero funding into the film. The filmmaker was hoping for support for the film’s launch, and hoped to curry favour by saying how fab the film agency had been. But there was precisely zero formal relationship between film and agency.

Maybe I should instead tell you about the agency potentate who, on being asked to view the work of a promising filmmaker, believed the cinematography to be avant garde because she didn’t realise she was watching the DVD in the wrong format, and on that basis decided she didn’t want to deal with them. The same woman studiously avoided me until wind of something or other I’d done got to her. At which point she greeted me saying ‘I’ve been hearing good things about you…’.

Sometimes it’s better to be ignored. I’ve chosen these particular pieces of dirty laundry from an overfull basket because I’m mulling over the news that the UK Film Council is to be scrapped. There’s a statistic doing the rounds stating that for every £1 invested in film, £5 will come back your way. Which strikes me as an overoptimistic analysis of the financial performance of films with backing from the UKFC or its franchises. Not a week before, I happily retweeted something saying that there was a 2:1 ratio for money invested in the arts generally. Hang on? Film has a fivefold rate of return, but the arts in general just double? I don’t need to be an accountant myself to scent some screwy figures at work there.

With the UKFC out of the way, will public funding of films be out the window? No, since there is still the option for Lottery money to be put into them. And I feel happier about going to a Lottery board than approaching a regional screen agency, with its partialities and intrigues — and I speak as someone in their good books. Besides, if we really are facing unprecedented cuts in the public sector, I’d feel happier remioving money from a privileged layer of middle managers than from a hospital. Especially after witnessing the stunning quality of compassionate care that my father received during his run-in with cancer, which ended when he passed away in the early hours of Monday morning.

Anyway, I’m not sure that even in an ideal world I’d want much public investment in the film sector. I’ve met far too many precious arses who want to subsist from the public purse and have no idea what a paying audience is or how to attract one. And film really is about bums on seats.

Somewhere in all this admittedly muddled and biased thinking is the notion that I’d like to see an indie sector to arise in British film more along the lines of the one that America has got used to. A functional economy that allows filmmakers to get by through concentrating their efforts on quality work at a sustainable level. In America, that culture has given rise to some of my favourite films, from the work of the Coen Brothers to Michael Clayton. If that’s something that could emerge from what’s happening now, then I hope you’ll join me in a salute to the end of the UK Film Council.