It is important to keep a sense of scale here. The cinema attendance figures I have quoted illustrate this, yes, a doubling of cinema visits per year in a ten year period is good news, but compared to a figure more than 30 times bigger in 1945 it seems negligible. The increase in production is also promising but again it doesn't compare to Britain's 1940's levels.In 1984 British production reached it nadir with only 28 major features released that year. This was two years after Chariots of Fire had reputedly been the catalyst for a British renaissance. Production has been steadily increasing since but didn't really pick up to a respectable level until the 1990's.

In Britain it only takes a single success to spawn a renewed optimism in cinema, an optimism which is rarely realised. Renaissance talk followed not only Chariots of Fire, but also My Beautiful Laundrette and more recently The Crying Game(1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral(1994) and Trainspotting(1996). Predictably, these more recent films prompted all the usual hopeful editorials on the future of British film, but they cannot really be said to represent the renaissance promised back in 1982.

Lester Friedman, in the introduction to his book British Cinema and Thatcherism, says 'insiders during the Thatcher era clearly understood that, rather than a last renaissance, this period should at best be regarded, in director Christopher Petit's phrase, as a 'brief revival in production''. To describe it as a 'renaissance', in terms of British film as an industry, is perhaps too dramatic a word. In the spirit of Thatcherism the judge of success would be the market; were there money to be made in British Film I doubt Thatcher would have abandoned it as she did.