In Jonathan Coe’s 1994 satire on rampant Thatcherite politics, Michael Owen, the protagonist and occasional narrator, has been commissioned to write a history of the Winshaw clan, ‘the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing, penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth’.

As a treat for his ninth birthday on 17^th Sept 1961, Michael is taken by his family on a day trip to Weston-super-Mare. Taking shelter from the rain they head to the cinema. The Odeon is playing The Naked Edge with Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr. Michael catches ‘the exotic scent of forbidden pleasures in the title’ and is also intrigued by a sign placed beneath the poster: NO ONE, BUT NO ONE, WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE THEATRE DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MINUTES OF THIS FILM. FLASHING RED LIGHT WILL WARN YOU. His parents decide to go instead to the Central, ‘Weston’s Only Independent Cinema’. They watch an ‘artless, stentorian celebration’ of Yuri Gagarin and settle down to the main feature, What a Carve Up! (Dir: Pat Jackson 1961) starring Sid James, Kenneth Connor and Shirley Eaton.

Michael is totally engrossed in the film, and bewitched by Shirely Eaton, ‘it was no longer Kenneth she spoke to but me, … it was me I saw on the screen, sharing a room with the most beautiful woman in the world’. However, his mother abruptly makes them leave during the film for the long drive back to Birmingham and Michael bursts into tears. Fiction and reality continue to blur for Michael and he becomes obsessed with the film. As he explains years later, ‘I wasn’t just watching it, that day. I was living it: that’s the feeling I thought would never come back, the one I’ve been waiting to recapture.’

Later in the novel, Michael also recalls once going to a porn cinema in the mid 1970s with his then wife, Verity. The film they see was shot entirely on location in Birmingham, ‘as a result it was enormously popular with the locals’. ‘Verity and I left the cinema without feeling noticeably aroused and spent the rest of the evening, I seem to remember, rearranging the holiday snaps from our recent trip to the Scilly Isles.’