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Going to the Flicks

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, Going to the Flicks, Episode 2

Charting the rise from the 1970s low ebb in cinema-going to today's exciting innovations.

Barry Norman on the changing experience of British cinema over the last century, charting the rise from the low ebb of the 1970s to today's exciting innovations. From January 2011.

Continuing his two-part survey of the changing experience of British cinema-going over the last century, Barry Norman starts with cinema at a low ebb in the 1970s and moves up to the exciting innovations of the present. 

Barry Norman is one of the best-loved critics of film in Britain but for this series he explores not the pictures on the screen but the changing experience of participating in one of the most popular cultural activity of all - simply going to the cinema.

He starts in the 1970s, when film was at a particularly low ebb and ticket sales had fallen to an all-time low. In conversation with Sir David Puttnam, he recalls his own pessimism about the future of cinema at the time. Moving onto the 1980s, Barry explores the impact of an American import - the Multiplex - on Britain. He then moves onto the challenge of videos and DVDs in the 1990s and is ultimately surprised to find how positive the picture now looks as British cinemas embrace 3D and other innovations and attendance figures continue to rise. 

Featuring archive never broadcast before, this series attempts for the first time ever to survey the changing experience of cinema-going in Britain over the last century. 

Producer: Beaty Rubens.

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Barry Norman on the changing experience of British cinema going over the last century

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