Aidan Smith: Is it Netflix or a dearth of ideas that is killing cinema?

All the best writing talent has now switched to television, so why bother going to the cinema, asks Aidan Smith

The flicks, the pictures, the movies - when was your last time? Maybe yesterday, a last-day-of-the-school hols treat for the kids, but I’m talking about a proper, grown-up cinematic experience where the drama is entirely centred round the film, not in how much that small sack of Pick ’n’ Mix is going to cost after it’s very nearly broken the food-vendor’s scales.

I honestly can’t remember my last time. After On the Buses, the bigscreen version, this cineaste’s CV is just a blur. OK, I exaggerate for comic effect, and if you had the misfortune to witness Reg Varney blown up to 50ft in your local Regal you’ll acknowledge that was quite a good gag, certainly no worse than any in the film - but my last time was a long time ago. If I have a spare hour and three-quarters now, I’ll try and find something on Netflix.

In so doing, apparently, I’m killing films. Throttling the movie-going experience to death. Those diabolical streaming services, and our dull devotion to them, are ruining the once-great institution of a picturehouse full of folk all chuckling and gasping in unison, drunk on Kiaora and communality.

Who says so? Dame Helen Mirren, no less. According to one report, she argues that the Netflix effect has hit hardest among those movie-makers “who create films with an audience in mind”. I would have thought that was all movie-makers but this noble breed definitely includes Mr Helen Mirren, the director Taylor Hackford.

“It’s devastating for the likes of my husband,” she says of the home viewing craze, “because they want their movies to be watched in a cinema. It should be a communal thing, an audience, a movie and you’re all in it together. You’re frightened, you laugh and you cry together. But it’s beginning to disappear.”

Ah Helen. I’ve delved into her celluloid oeuvre from time to time. The first was Hussy early in her great career in which she played a prostitute. Myself and three chums were sufficiently intrigued by the tagline “How much sex is enough?”, but no one else was. The four of us didn’t seem to constitute a quorum in the Classic, Edinburgh’s favourite racymovie flea-pit. When someone, usually Dame Helen, disrobed on screen we just got more and more nakedly self-conscious. The elderly usherettes in their horn-rims seemed to be staring straight at us. Our earlier cockiness had shrivelled and we would have happily had the projectionist abandon the showing. Communal feeling wasn’t much in evidence that day.

Then there was Caligula. La Mirren was in that, too, along with numerous big beasts of the Shakespearean stage who earnestly believed that serious-masterpiece status was a given for this biopic of the mad Roman emperor who was in love with his sister and made his horse second-in-command. The top-grade thesps were appalled when they viewed the finished work, bulging with bare, undulating flesh. But with the world’s secondmost-famous porn magnate producing, what did they really expect? In the cheap seats, meanwhile, my gang of four were laughing and crying, though not always at the appropriate moments.

I’m sure Dame Helen isn’t thinking of Caligula when she harks back to a golden age of cinema and cinemagoing but right now there are films which do more harm to cinema than Netflix. These are the playsafe films which, come to think of it, lack the bonkers bonking boldness of Caligula. There are the copycat