Free It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive by Mark Kermode

crammed together in a small office like Coppola’s colourful Rumble fish , needing to blow off steam in the relatively safe environment of a really well-organised row.
    Occasionally, the creativity tipped over into madness. Like all my memories of Manchester, everything that happened in the City Life offices seemed unbelievably important and prone to controversy – even the simple task of making a cup of tea. I remember my first experience of ‘being mother’ for the assembled masses, proudly scrabbling around the smelly kitchen in search of an old teapot in order to prepare a proper brew – after all, the people who worked here were ‘real journalists’ and frankly I was in awe of them. I diligently took orders for milk and sugar, and produced a tray of steaming teas that duly matched their exacting demands. Everyone was suitably grateful and polite except one CL stalwart who made a silent but commanding gesture for me to wait while he tasted the tea which I had brought. I stood, uncertain as to whether this was a joke. It wasn’t. It was deadly serious. He lifted the cup to his lips, took a tiny slurp, swilled it around his mouth, considered for a moment, took another slurp, exercised his palette some more, and then slammed the teacup down on to the desk, a look of assertive rapture in his eyes. He stared at me, astonished.
    ‘Number four!’ he said grandly.’Straight in at number four !’
    I had no idea what he was talking about.
    I looked at him. He looked at me.
    Then he swung round in his chair and ripped down a piece of paper which had been Sellotaped to the wall of the office.
    ‘Number four!’ he said again.‘Ahead of Auty in ’83, but just behind Spinoza and Spinoza again in ‘84, and way behind Hill, still untouchable at the top spot.’
    ‘What?’ I said, confused.
    ‘Top Ten Teas!’ he replied grandly, as if it were the most obvious thing on earth.’You’re straight in at number four, but Hill and Spinoza are still ahead. Spinoza twice !’
    I looked at him, certain that he was having me on. But the list, which he was now studiously rewriting, spoke for itself. There, scribbled but precise, was an account of the top ten cups of tea that had been served in the City Life office, with names and dates dutifully recorded like a court record-keeper’s log. And there was I, new on the list, going ‘straight in at number four’, thereby displacing the former numbers four to nine and knocking out number ten entirely.
    City Life really did keep a list of ‘Top Ten Teas’.
    And this was years before Nick Hornby and High fidelity .
    And I was straight in at number four.
    I loved working for City Life !
    But inevitably, City Life didn’t always love me – particularly when I crashed their delivery van.
    The delivery run was one of the many tasks to which more lowly members of the co-op would aspire. Due to my student status, I was only ever a part-time worker and therefore a part-time co-op member, which meant that I got all the perks of working at the mag with little or none of the real responsibility – both practical and financial. I was, in effect, a makeweight, although it has since pleased me to insist that I was a core member of the City Life family. The truth is more mundane – I was a hanger-on, albeit an enthusiastic one.
    I wasn’t much good at anything, but I did have a clean driver’s licence and I had never been declared legally bankrupt, which was not something that everyone at City Life could say. So, more often than not, I got the job of driving the City Life van over the moors to the printers in Batley, and then shipping the finished copies back to a string of distribution warehouses on the outskirts of Manchester overnight, before doing early-morning drops at local newsagents in the city centre. It was fantastically exciting stuff, turning up at remote depots at all hours in the morning and being referred to as ‘Driver!’ (rather than ‘Student Wanker’) wherever you