Tuesday Film Club, 4B

ok here's how it started. The building's fire alarm went off at two in the morning in January, a false one, a toaster in 2C, and all of us stood out on the pavement in coats over pyjamas for forty minutes and somebody, I think it was Bea from the ground floor, said "this is like the start of a film," and Marcus from 4B said "which film," and it went from there. Six of us now. Every Tuesday, Marcus's flat, because he's got the projector and the wall with nothing on it. He's also got one lamp. One. He says it's for the atmosphere. It's actually because the other one broke in March and he hasn't got round to it. Tonight's my pick. I've been dreading it. The way it works is you pick, you introduce it in "no more than two minutes, Sunil, I'm serious", and then afterwards everyone says what they thought and you're not allowed to defend it until they're all done. It's brutal. Bea picked a three-hour Hungarian thing in April and we had to have a cooling-off period. I've gone for a comedy. A big, dumb, joyful American comedy from the eighties with a car chase and a man falling into a swimming pool. I need people to know that I know it's not high art. I've prepared a defence anyway. "Two minutes," Marcus says. "It's a comedy." "That's four seconds. Go on." "My dad used to put this on every Christmas. It's the first film I remember laughing at, properly, the kind where you can't breathe. That's it. That's the whole introduction." Bea, who has a doctorate in something, looks at me over her wine like I've brought a hamster to a dinner party. Then the lamp goes off and the projector goes on. Here's the thing about watching a dumb comedy with five adults who've spent seven months taking cinema very seriously in a room with one lamp: they crack. Marcus goes first, at the swimming pool bit, a great big honk of a laugh that he tries to turn into a cough. Then Priya, who's a nurse and does nights and hasn't laughed at anything since the Hungarian film. Then Old Ted from the top floor, who I honestly thought was asleep, saying "oh that's very good" out loud like he's marking it.

By the car chase Bea's got her hand over her mouth. After, lights on. The one lamp. Everyone looks at me. "Well," Marcus says. "It's not cinema." "No." "The script's a mess." "It is." "I laughed eleven times. I counted. That's more than the Hungarian one." "Nobody laughed at the Hungarian one, Marcus, it was about a dying horse." Bea puts her glass down. "My father used to put on a film every Christmas too," she says. "A musical. I've never told anyone that because it's embarrassing. Can I do it next week?" "That's not how the rota works," says Marcus. "Marcus." "Fine. Rota's suspended." Old Ted is putting his coat on. At the door he stops and says to me, "Your dad had good taste," and goes off up the stairs, and I have to go and stand in the kitchen for a minute pretending to look for a bottle opener. Next week: Bea's musical. I'm bringing a second lamp.