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

went. The vehicles themselves came from Manchester Van Hire, and if you were lucky you got one with a radio and even (occasionally) a cassette player which would turn your journey into a sublime musical odyssey. I remember pulling out of the printers with a full load and pressing uphill on to the dual carriageway with the Comsat Angels’ first album Waiting For A Miracle warbling on the stereo and thinking I had never been happier in my entire life.
    The problem was that driving all night with your hands wet on the wheel (in the immortal words of Golden Earring) wasn’t great from a safety point of view, particularly if you’d spent the whole of the previous day industriously attempting to smash the state by standing on some dodgy student picket or other and playing South African liberation songs on the French horn and trombone. This is not a joke; I really did play in a quasi-revolutionary brass band who performed foghorn-like arrangements of ANC anthems to lift the spirits of protestors as they trudged through the streets of Manchester – a weekly occurrence in those heady days. We were very enthusiastic but also quite terrible. I remember very clearly turning up late to one particular march and as my mouthpiece-wielding compatriots and I ran to catch up with the crowd, a long-suffering policeman was heard very loudly to exclaim, ‘Oh God, not the band … please, not the band !’
    But marching and blowing can leave you all puffed out, and driving the van after a hard day’s radical flugelhorning was always going to end in tears. So it was that early one morning, toward the end of the City Life run, I was coming off the M56 on to the series of slip roads which feed on to the Princess Parkway – a large dual carriageway leading straight into the centre of the city. There was neither traffic around nor any adverse weather conditions – surprisingly for the so-called rainy city. As I came off the motorway I banked left with the slip road, then curved right as it looped back onitself before snaking up toward the dual carriageway. It’s a tricky stretch, ideally taken at around 30 mph but with a temptingly twisty appearance which seems to say ‘Go on, you can do it, it’ll be fun …. Let’s floor it .’ For the record, I never actually ‘floored it’ – I was always too chicken. But I would take asinine delight in accelerating slightly out of the first turn and into the second bend because the van would lean one way, then the other, in a manner which seemed far more dramatic than it actually was. Pathetic, I know, but hey I was young and foolish.
    Nowadays I am old and stupid. So it goes.
    Anyway, as I came into the second bend, something happened. For years I would assert that the load shifted in the back of the van – which indeed it did , toppling awkwardly from one side to the other and thereby briefly unbalancing the vehicle. Recently I have come to accept the more shameful possibility that I was actually checking my hair in the rear-view mirror and was temporarily caught off guard. Whatever – the result was the same; the van wobbled and I overcorrected with the steering wheel, causing it to slew. The back of the van swung out and the whole vehicle started careening gracefully toward the restraining barriers on the outside rim of the road. Although I wasn’t actually going very fast, the rear end of the van had a fair amount of weight and thwacked into the barriers, striking the offside corner with a rubbery thud. Now, if you know anything about motorway barriers (which I didn’t, but do now ) you’ll know that they are designed to be flexible, to absorb the shock in the event of being struck by a vanload of City Life s. In my case, the barrierabsorbed the shock extremely effectively but then, like some oversized guitar string being plucked, appeared to twang back against the van, swatting the rear corner away like a fly, and causing the front offside corner to perform an almost identical