For every remake of Pride & Prejudice, you will get a Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. For every Four Weddings & a Funeral, you will find a Snatch. When you find a Notting Hill, you’ll find a 51st State – the list isn’t quite endless, it’s just bigger than your average list or piece of string. You see, where you have Hollywood we have Pinewood just as you have the “glitz” of the Oscars, we have the “dignified ceremony” of the BaFTAs. On the Wysteria lane of the international film industry, you are the habitual Eva Longoria to our repressed & slightly neurotic Terri Hatcher.

When you get on a plane and cross the North Atlantic, you’re not just crossing an Ocean; you’re crossing the broad divide between British chalk & American cheese – where behind you will have Drew Barrymore in ‘Perfect Catch’ infront of you, you will have Colin Firth in ‘Fever Pitch’. ‘Two separate films!’ I hear you cry, but in actuality they are both based on the same story.

For the filmmakers of the future, it begins in the classroom & the lecture halls.

In the UK, to formally study film, cinema, video production media & the like, more often than not means that you are going to be saddled with the stigma of doing a “Mickey Mouse” course, which is best translated as meaning “Mostly Harmless” in the scholarly world of Further & Higher Education – where we as students have to pay tuition fees for the right to be able to miss lectures and seminars & hand in coursework well past its deadline.

In the classroom & lecture hall you’ll often find two very distinct types of student; those who say a lot & do little, and those who say little & do a lot. Those who have much to say will often confess to anyone within earshot to having formed a watertight career plan, which will carry them swiftly & fortuitously to stardom where they won’t forget their friends (until they become unfashionable to know) or their family (until they become unfashionable to be related to). They will invariably wear sunglasses in the middle of winter, wear scarves at the height of summer, and persist in referring to everyone as ‘darling’ or ‘luvvie’.

Whereas those who say very little are pretty much indistinguishable from any student you care to think of, baring carrying the occasional film studies text book with them to & from class, but who remain forever forgettable to their more vocal peers, by virtue of the fact that they don’t want to be seen with them.

The irony of this situation is that the vocal students often falter at the first hurdle once they have graduated, often citing artistic pressures, disillusionment with the industry, all of which meaning the same underlying fact – that they couldn’t find anyone who would employ them & woefully resign themselves to a 9 to 5 job. They will, however, be the first in the queue to the press when their less vocal but invariably more successful friend from College or University (who they now remarkably remember the name of) has been nominated for several BaFTAs & is a favourite to clear the board at the Oscars the following year.