🎞️The Origin Story
(Or: How I Learned About Safe Spaces and the View From a Different Seat)
If you really want to trace my lifelong love affair with cinema, you could start in 1984 — opening weekend of Ghostbusters. My dad took me to the cinema for the first time, and the experience changed everything. Scared senseless, I couldn’t look away and a cinephile was made on the spot. But truthfully, my love of film started earlier — not with the big screen, but with the small one glowing in the half-light of my grandma’s living room.
Picture the scene. Northern England, the dawn of the 1980s. Thatcher reigned, the air smelled of toast and coal, and I was a five-year-old kid whose life was already caught in a messy domestic subplot. My parents’ marriage had collapsed, and my mum’s new partner — a wretched, abusive man — was already the villain of the piece, though no one knew the extent of it yet. My brother and I were separated, and the trauma and chaos of those years would spool out for decades, like an incriminating home movie on repeat.
Cut to — my dad, bleary-eyed at five in the morning, gently lifting me out of bed and carrying me across the street in my Muppet Show pyjamas. He worked long hours, so he’d drop me off with my Nana before school. And it was there, in those pre-dawn hours, that the magic happened.
Every morning was a double bill: buttered toast and a movie. No rules, no filters, no censorship. Just pure, glorious escapism on the telly. Sometimes, the evenings were encore performances — Dad off to his pool league, Nana sending me down to the local video shop with a couple of quid to rent a movie and grab a bag of penny sweets.
This is where my real education began.
My grandma — Nana T, as she was known to her legion of adoring grandkids — was a woman of epic proportions: in size, in warmth, in spirit. She was built for widescreen, the kind of woman whose laugh had surround sound before it was invented. My favourite seat in the house wasn’t the sofa — it was her. I’d climb up and nestle into her enormous belly and bosom, a safe harbour of floral prints and Yardley lavender, and together we’d watch…everything.
And I mean everything. The Great Escape. Carry On Camping. Psycho. Friday the 13th. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Hammer horror, screwball comedies, gangster flicks, old musicals — all on the same sacred screen. Nothing was off limits. She’d add her own director’s commentary: tales of teenage dates at the picture house, gossip about silver screen idols, confessions of the movies that made her weep. It was, in hindsight, the greatest film school imaginable — free, daily, and taught with unconditional love.
What I learned in those mornings went far beyond genre or mise-en-scène. I learned escapism. How to slip the bounds of a life no kid should have to endure and lose myself in light and story. I learned love without judgment. I’m fairly sure my Nana saw the twirling, overly sensitive boy I already was — a boy who didn’t quite fit the frame society offered him — and she loved me all the more for it. She never told me to tone it down, to act like other boys. She just passed the toast, pressed play, and let me be.
Those mornings were my sanctuary. My refuge. My first safe set. And in that flickering glow, I came to understand something fundamental about cinema: it can be a lifeline. A way to survive. A way to see yourself, even when the world around you refuses to.
So when I say The Re:Cut begins with her, I mean it quite literally. My entire emotional relationship with movies — the reason I rewatch, reflect, and reframe — starts on that armchair, with toast crumbs on my pyjamas and Nana’s heartbeat in my ear.
It’s fitting, then, that the first film I’ve chosen to revisit is Hans Christian Andersen. It was our absolute favourite, and we watched it countless times. A Technicolor fantasia about imagination, loneliness, and belonging — the perfect reel to reconnect with that boy on his Nana’s lap, staring at the screen and dreaming himself into every frame.
