A life-long love of the cinema, drama, performance and storytelling, even if it was simply reportage, took me to places like the National Youth Theatre and the BBC. I also trained as a teacher (teaching drama in primary schools) and travelled to places like the Middle East. After early retirement from the Broken Biscuit Company, I took to film production, working on the writing, development and production of shorts and features.

I discovered Netribution as soon as it started and got to know Tom Fogg and Nic Wistreich and admired what they were trying to do, so when they asked me to be Netribution's Northern News Editor, I was delighted.

Since then, I worked with Nic when he was development Director of Shooting People on developing the Wideshot website to showcase rising UK film talent. I edit Wideshot which has now both narrowed and widened its scope. narrowed because now it features only members of Shooting People and widened because some of them are in our US branches, like New York and L.A. so Wideshot is now international.

Nic and I have also worked on two Get Your Film Funded books, the first published by Shooting peoople and the second published by Netribution. When Nic told me he wanted top re-start Netribution and make it better and bigger than ever, using new web tools... well, I couldn't refuse to help a website that I always really loved.

Like many of the baby boom generation who have spanned more than a half-century, I have learned quite a lot and seen far more, as Britain lifted itself from post-war austerity through age of the nuclear family to our present state of relative affluence. Rather than having such wisdom pass with me, I am happy to pass it on to anyone who cares to listen...blah blah blah blah You know what I mean....

In summary, people, places and cultures and how they all interact and the tools and skills they use and the thoughts they have, always fascinated me. If you want to know more about MacGregor, read on.......

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PORTENT

I got an early taste for performance at the Durham Road Methodist Chapel in Blackhill, where I went to Sunday School, although we were a family of Anglicans. The chapel celebrated its founding with an Anniversary and we small Christians had our part to play by doing Recitations. Mine was to be a short poem. My family had encouraged me to say it loud, reasoning that at the age of six, I was a very small boy and the Durham Road Chapel was very big. It certainly seemed so to me, stood on a podium, surrounded by all these expectant faces, some below in the bady of the chapel, some above in the galleries, all staring at me. It felt a little daunting, but there was a rush of adreniline coming along, the fight or flight syndrome.

I wasn't running. I had been pre-programmed; "Say it LOUD; they have to hear you at the BACK!"

I can't remember now, what the poem was, but I declaimed it loud, as ordered. They must have heard it at the back because when I had finished there was loud applause. From eveywhere, faces beamed, at me... I was shocked and surprised. But there was also a nice feeling. People had liked what I did. That pleased me.

There was also preseent, a speaker who was a well known Methodist circuit preacher. I don't know if it was because he caught the prevailing mood of the congregation, or just liked my delivery, but he said "That young man will be either a teacher, a preacher, or he will read the news on the BBC!" The congregation liked that, they applauded again and laughed as well, this time. That pleased me all the more. I had given my first public performance. I had no idea what the preacher had meant, but his comments became a family mantra and over the years they came back to haunt me time and again.

MY EARLY LIFE IN CINEMA

My life in cinema began when I joined the ABC Minors aged 7. I discovered Buck Rogers and thrilled at his efforts to defeat the mighty emperor, Ming The Merciless. That his cardboard spaceship seemed to be powered by sparklers, spitting sparks out of the rear end, mattered not. The story was the thing and in today's prices, just 2.5 pence, it was a bargain admission. I was totally hooked. I have been ever since, though the cost is now closer to a fiver.

As well as the ABC cinema, I patronised the Empire and the finest cinema that Consett, Co Durham had to offer; the exquisite Plaza. The Plaza was resplendent in cinema art deco style of the 1930's. All plush beige and cream, orange and gold. None of your ABC mass-market burgundy plush here, thank you. The Plaza lay upstairs, above a parade of shops. You ascended a marbled staircase to attend the Plaza. Definitely upmarket. When you went to the pictures there, you knew you were on your way up.

The Olympia was my local and only charged six pence for the cheapest seats, whereas the ABC and Plaza charged ninepence, so for my two shillings weekly pocket money I got one sixpenny outing to the ABC minors and either three outings to the Olympia or just two, involving either the ABC or the Plaza. In those pre-TV days I spent hours in anguished study, pouring over the cinema advertisements in the Consett Guardian in order to plan my week.

PACKED PROGRAMMES

With all the cinemas running four programmes a week Saturday/Monday, Tuesday/Wednesday, Thursday/Friday and a one-day programme on Sundays, we had a great choice of films. There were bonuses as well, because they all had main features and supporting features. If you timed it right and gobbled an early tea down, you could get to the first house of the evening and see the main and the supporting feature. Then, if you moved seat to another part of the auditorium, to a different usherette's territory and kept very quiet, you could see the main feature all over again. We liked to get value for our money. There was a period when I thought cinema usherettes had the greatest job in the world. They saw ALL the features AND the cinema paid them. What better job could there be?

Journeys home from the Olympia were always interesting and usually, action packed, specially if I had seen a film alongside some pals. There was short-cut home across some wasteland which had bushes and long grass for concealment, broken down buildings for purposes of ambush and a steep grassy escarpment which was perfect for performance of dramatic death rolls. The kind where you foolishly break the skyline with the enemy down below. He fires and you are hit. Somewhere in the chest was signalled by a collar bone clutch. A hit in the gut provoked a jack-knife duck. We would hover on the brink, so everyone could get the full benefit of our final performance... and then we dived headlong and rolled down the slope.

These were all heroic deaths. We knew no other way to go, but it was good to be able to practice all our moves and vote on which death descent was the Oscar-winner. The one drawback to this form of performance art, is that it can lead to heavy wear and tear on clothing, or to accumulations of dirt and grime that never seemed to appear when these same acrobatics were performed on the silver screen. And my mother failed totally to understand how important it was to me to get these things right. Talk of ration cards and the high cost of clothes never came into our prime concerns, although a badly bruised bare knee could be painful. Yes, that was the permanent indignity we heroes suffered. Short trousers until you were 12 if you were tall, older if you were a little on the short side. I was glad I was pretty tall. I would get into long trousers first, I hoped.

FORBIDDEN TERRITORIES

Sometimes I ventured as far as the Roxy in Leadgate, a neighbouring village, though not often. The Roxy sometimes ran a feature I had not been able to schedule myself to see in Consett. There was one other cinema in our town, but I was fobidden to go there - on pain of death. The Town Hall was not a municipal building at all, but a cinema built in what had been erected as a town hall, like a village hall. It was also reputed to be the local flea pit, hence the parental stricture.

This stricture was unknown to my cousin Barry who came to stay for a holiday. When a joint expedition to the pictures was suggested, it was ordained by my parents that Barry, as the guest, should choose which picture we went to see. When we got to Consett, he chose the film screening at the Town Hall.  My explanation about the stricture appeared to cut no ice with Barry, who had all the extra confidence of an additional three years over my total. "We'll just say we went to the Empire," Barry suggested emphatically.

On our return, my incessant itching and scratching raised my mother's suspicions sufficiently for her to ask, which cinema had we been to? Following Barry's plan, I said we had been to the Empire. There was no fooling my mother, who deeclared that reply to be complete rubbish and turning to Barry she said she was sure she would get the truth if she asked him. Barry responded promptly. He thought it was called The Town Hall Cinema, not the Empire. There followed the indignity of the forced bath and scrub with carbolic soap from my mother, the belt from my father for telling lies. Barry's lies, as I remember. Some of us have to suffer for our art. Cousin Barry descended to basement level in my affections and never rose again. I never again attempted to go to the Town Hall Cinema.

BLOODY BARRY AGAIN!

In exchange for Barry's stay with us, I got to stay with Barry. Although he was no longer on my Chriostmas card list, the beautiful Yorkshire village of Marske-by-the-sea certainly was on my favourite sandy beaches list. And Marske had its own cinema. the feature that night was King Kong. I mean, King Kong!! Barry had seen it, but I was to be allowed to go alone, to the first house at 5.00pm, because the cinema lay just across the High Street from the village shop which was home to Auntie Bertha.

It was a great film. A gigantic gorilla, a girl trapped in his huge fist like a living doll! he climbed the Empire State building while biplanes snarled around him and chat-chatted him with machine guns spitting all around, while he snarled and roared defiance at the world. What fodder for a boy's fertile imagination!

I couldn't get the visions of those swirling planes screaming round the tower out of my head and the noise, a sort of screeching of brakes and a big bump as I hit the tarmac. Next thing I remember was a strange man shning a light into my eyes and I was in Auntie Bertha's kitchen at the back of the shop. It turned out he was the driver of the car who also happened to be the local doctor. I was thereafter forbidden to go alone to the village cinema, in case of further road accidents. I was allowed to go only with Barry.

CINEMA SPOILS

My screen vice was further fed by my Auntie Elsie. Spinster headmistress of a girls' school, she always liked to indulge me. Her annual treeat for my birthday was always a slap-up lunch in the Station Hotel in Newcastle, followed by a matinee in one of the posh cinemas of Newcastle. Either the Queens, or the Odeon which had truly enormous screens that enveloped you in the screen action. Heady stuff. I always loved my Auntie Elsie. She knew how to make a small boy very happy. In a fruit-starved chilhood, she seduced me with the power of fresh melon slices sprinkled with ginger by the Station Hotel waiter. La Dolce Vita !

So it was that in my tenth year, surrounded by one of those big city screens, that John Huston's Moby Dick made an enormous impression on me. The Great White Whale was almost as big as the Queens Theatre and the sound of it thrashing through the Pacific was spattered right around the auditorium. Awesome.

I enjoyed Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, drawn with immediate empathy for Kirk Douglas's cocky young matelot and loved Peter Lorre's character role as that funny Frenchman or whatever he was meant to be, but it was James Mason's role as the brooding enigmatic Captain Nemo that stole the show. My Auntie Elsie told me he was from Lancashire, which was in the North where I lived. This was hard to believe. Could people from the North make films? Two great surprises in one day.

THE STAGE BECKONS

The Duke was responsible for kindling my performance flame. He was one of the education aristocracy, a truly gifted teacher. We grammar school boys were expected to work hard, but there wasn't much play, unless you were blssed with footballer feet. Mine wre both left ones, so my opportunity for self-expression on the sports field was handicapped. The Duke was paid to teach English, but what he really liked was Shakespeare's plays and after an early encounter with Romeo & Juliet, so did I.

It has all the essential ingredients: boy meets girl, kids reject parental values, tribal warfare between rival adolescent gangs, boy loses girl, conspiracy, defiance - and in the end the lovers die, tragically. It was made for the screen and I am pleased so many distinguished producers and directors have shared my sense of vision. The Weinsteins would have signed Will on the spot quicker than I can spell Tarrantino and he would have become a great film indie with hit after cult hit packing out the picture houses.

The Duke did not share my sense of vision. In his mind was a vision of the school speech day, when they created dux medllists or somesuch hierarchy and the need to entertain and amuse the parents and governors.

YOUNG SHOULDERS

So it was that I was signed to play an old man in an extract from the comedy Twelfth Night or What You Will. It was a challenge, I was only 13. The Duke's direction soon took care of that. "Think burden, boy; a huge weight on frail shoulders, the years grinding and crushing you down - tell us about that - not in your talk, but in your walk! Ah, That's better. You have aged forty years, boy, well done."

It was the Alec Guinness technique. Sir Alec always maintained his characters began with the right pair of shoes. The shoes dictated the walk and the character built from there, though ithis was all new territory to me at that time. Being anyone other than me though, was something that had appeal. In the angsty years of adolescence, the chance to be anyone other than me was too good to miss.

I was destined to play old men. Within three years I had aged as far as Hamlet's father Claudius and with a couple more I hit the emotional pinnacle of Lear. I still exchange Christmas cards with the Duke. His is addressed to hs house; "Old Master Shallow." Mine comes addressed to King Lear. A tremendous emotional release came along with the applause, a sense of release, relief and a humbling effect rolled into one, but BOY did it hurt getting that beard carefully ripped off afterwards. It was attached by liberal applicaion of some foul-smelling glue that ensured my life was forever free of substance abuse, but well hooked on performance.

I fed this vice in a variety of ways, by taking every school trip I could, to go to the theatre. The Duke was keen on this as well, so there were plenty of bus trips to catch Shakespere on many distant stages. George Couloris played a memorable Shylock at the People's Theatre, Newcastle. his was an amateur stage, but of such high standing that professional actors were delighted to join The People's for a season. It was heady stuff for a boy from a remote steel town, high up on the Pennines.