Who forgets their first visit to the cinema? For J G Ballard it was Disney's Snow White. "That vicious queen took up residence," he later wrote, "inside my six-year-o1d brain for months afterwards." Peter Greenaway was dragged screaming from "a Technicolor western of a greenish hue" at the Odeon Cinema in Newport.

For Julie Walters it was going to see a Norman Wisdom film at the Essoldo Cinema in Birmingham [...]

I spent most of the summer of 1989 visiting Jonathan Miller to discuss a television history of madness we were putting together for the BBC. Another regular visitor that summer was Miller's friend and neighbour, Alan Bennett. Miller would talk, ideas would spark and flow, and he would hold forth on everything from Victorian asylums to George III's porphyria. After a few minutes, Bennett would get up: "I think I [...]