As a child, Norman Spencer was tantalised by his parents’ talk of “moving pictures”, and would gaze perplexed at the paintings on the living-room wall. “I could not understand as a six-year-old how pictures could move,” he told the British Entertainment History Project in 1999. “I used to say to them, ‘Is it someone behind that moves things?’”
His first cinema visit at the age of nine cleared up the confusion, and ignited a passion for film that would endure for the next century. “I was hooked from that moment onwards.”
