The film scholar Robin Wood, who died recently, taught me English during the mid-1960s at Welwyn Garden City High School (now Sir Frederick Osborn Comprehensive). He was one of those teachers who "made a difference". He helped me learn that it was all right for a boy from a working-class home to study stuff such as literature. But it was largely through film that he achieved this. Despite the dismay of many of my peers, Robin often ignored the English syllabus in favour of showing us films, encouraging us to argue about them, and also write about them. He wanted us to do what he himself had learned to do: to take films seriously, look at them closely, and make up our own minds, uninhibited by a weight of critical scholarship and the demands of a curriculum.