How good is that? I mean, no-one subscribes to these film channels do they? Occasionally someone would announce they had access to the full range of Sky Movies products but they generally had their set-top box hooked up to some dodgy encryption device (not me though, your Honour) rather than pay the subscription charges.

And Film4 is far better than Sky Movies anyway. There’s more quality and less blandness. Whilst the quantity of films shown might not match Sky there are far fewer repeats and multi-plays. Sky’s film channels contain more turkeys than the combined freezers of every supermarket the week before Christmas.

Plus, if you don’t subscribe to movie channels, how often do you get a watchable film on TV? Occasionally you might find the odd mainstream (i.e. pants) blockbuster to dumb down to, but for the most part its pretty poor fayre.

Even then, if you’re watching Armageddon/Independence Day/A. N. Other disaster movie on either of the big two terrestrial stations, it’s something of a disappointment. You nip out to the toilet and return perplexed by what you see before you. “I didn’t know Huw Edwards/Trevor McDonald was in this. The pace seems to have dropped slightly but you have to say with all this talk of Israel and Lebanon the film is wonderfully contemporary. And informative. It’s almost like watc . . . oh, hang on it IS the news. The film doesn’t restart for another 40 minutes?”

I mean, a good movie is a work of art. The action is paced in such a way that the drama unfolds to maximum effect over the course of the film and only a Philistine would consider it acceptable to mess with that. You wouldn’t rip the Mona Lisa in two and insert the front page of newspaper in the middle would you?

When Francis Ford Coppola directed Apocalypse Now I doubt he considered how Kurtz’s descent into madness could be fitted in around a feature on water shortages in Kent or an obituary for obscure minor royals.

But now there’s Film4 for all (all those not still making do with ordinary telly that is). Lost in Translation, Sexy Beast, The Fifth Element, The Madness of King George, Zoolander and Road to Perdition are just some of the tasty-looking offerings served up by those nice people at Film4 in the first week of its re-launch.

Channel 4 celebrated the changes to its sister station on Saturday night with Film4’s 50 Films To See Before You Die. Ostensibly a show highlighting the type of quality, ground-breaking movies Film4 will be showing (iconic is their press release buzz word), it also gave Channel 4 yet another opportunity to fill hours of airtime with a list show.

The countdown-clips/talking-heads format is beloved by C4 execs struggling to fill the three nanoseconds a day not taken up by Big Brother coverage but this one was actually worth watching.

List shows enrage any right-minded person distraught that Gripper Stebson polled lower than Booga Benson in the 217 Best Grange Hill Characters Of 1979-1989.

This is mainly down to the fact these countdowns are voted for by a Great British public that continually undermines your faith in democracy (if you think Gonch is superior to Danny Kendall then how can you be trusted to use your vote wisely in an election?).

This time around a far more agreeable chart (to me anyroad) was agreed upon by a panel of experts.

Maybe this is the way forward and the ubiquitous, some say pointless, list show has, in actual fact, demonstrated the unendurable weakness of our democratic system.

Let’s have a panel of unelected experts run the country. Say, a Central Committee of sorts.

Then we could have somewhere we could throw the Gonch-lovers. Let’s call it a gulag. Whadya mean its been tried before? Joseph who?