What’s on my mind to talk to you about today is so obvious as to be mansplaining, but it’s also happy and lately I think I’ve been so focused on writing issues and writing problems that I’ve been a bit grumpy. So let me say with a very cheery heart that watching “Yes, Minister” from the 1980s has shown me that everything comes around again and nothing changes.

Wait, no, that’s miserable. Let me try again.

Right now I really want to see “Coyote vs Acme”. I also want to see “Pressure” that I read the play script a few months ago. And I also really want to be able to tell a friend that okay, yes, I went to see “The Odyssey” on your insistence and it was good/bad/indifferent* *delete as applicable.

I haven’t seen any of these, but the point is that they are three films in cinemas that I want to see. Well, two. That friend says that seeing Odyssey is practically a cultural imperative these days and I’ve argued back that I have no culture, but she isn’t having any of it. I’ve promised to see it. I keep failing.

But it’s still in cinemas. Coyote vs Acme is newer but still there. And I’m not sure about Pressure’s release dates but it’s either now or soon.

And the thing is that it isn’t more than an hour ago that it was said cinema was dead, dying, or on life support. Even taking COVID out of the picture, cinema was dying. And admittedly studios glommed on to superhero films like they were going to save the world but glommed on so much that there was bugger-all else to see and that was fine, that was fine, they had all the money the remaining audience could give them, until they stopped going too.

Yet here we are. Maybe it’s a fluke and tomorrow there’ll be nothing to see but Disney’s latest live-action remake of a cartoon. I say live-action. I mean Disney’s latest CGI remake of a cartoon.

But I had a great time seeing The Invite the other month and Project Hail Mary before that. So at least this run of good movies has been going on for a little while. It gives me hope that it will continue.

And as pleased as I am, I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. Because I mean it about everything coming around again. I suddenly feel old saying that, like the next thing I’m going to write to you will begin with “back in my day…” or “of course I’ve seen it all before…” but let me pretend to be even older than I am for a moment.

In 1922 when the BBC’s 2LO radio station started, it was the death of theatre. (I’ve seen 2LO: the entire station used to be in this glass museum-like display case in a BBC building where I worked.) When television came along, it was the death of radio. We’re still at the stage where television is dying, but it’s putting up a fight against YouTube shorts and in many ways TV has never been better.

Cinema looked like it was killed or being killed by streamers and yet, at least for today, it is looking stronger.

Mind you, as well as those two and a half cinema films I want to see, I’m also keen to watch Enola Holmes 3 and The Sheep Detectives on streaming.

But then I hear that “Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture” is coming back to cinemas and I am actually tempted. A little.