Feel remarkably together and well prepared for the day. Alan is at breakfast and hadn’t gone to sleep until two as he had the room over the bar. ‘It was like Christmas down there,’ he says, rather morosely.

He goes and I’m alone in this recently-refurbished, rather ornate dining room with ‘Adam’ pretensions and a giggly waitress who reports loudly my every word back to the kitchen.

I’m driven down solid, leafy roads to a cul-de-sac in Ben Rhydding and up to Briargarth, which is my home for the film. A long, detached, stone house of (probably) Edwardian vintage, with a porch and gables. Carpenters, painters, sparks swarm over it. Loud banging, shouts, and, amidst it all, actors –myself, Maggie and Liz – wandering gingerly, waiting to take possession.

Gradually the first scene creaks into action. Round the table, eating Spam. We reach around for our characters, absorbing all the clues and helps and hindrances of this brand new place in which we must act as if it were all too familiar.

Maggie, brittle and tense so often in non-acting moments, gives so much out when she plays the scene that it’s exhilarating to be with her.

A hot bath and a lager. Then walk down into Ilkley – clean, ordered, respectable, with oriel windows above the shops, glass-canopied arcades and ornamental flower beds. It’s like the Garden of Eden after Gospel Oak. Choose Chez Franc¸ois – a wine bar – for a solitary meal. Read of Bun˜url and the Surrealists in Paris in the late ’20’s and ’30’s. Similarities with Pythons. Bourgeois against the bourgeoisie. Bun˜url sounds rather like TJ. Very interested in sex and the Middle Ages and blamed the media for all the world’s ills.

To Don’s for 9.15 haircut appointment. The extraordinary mixture of Brazil and Private Function has left my head looking like a hairstyle exhibition site. Don notices the silvery threads. I’m going grey, gently but alas irreversibly.

This evening I go to catch my first glimpse of a Brazil cut at the Baronet viewing theatre – a full house with 30 or so people crammed into a very small space. The film is two and a half hours long. As expected, each frame an oil painting. A garden of visual delights. Dream sequences puzzling but unfinished.

Jonathan’s central performance is masterly. He holds all the disparate pieces together. Manages to react 600 different ways to the same sort of situations and carries you along, explaining by expressions what we are required to think and feel. Detail as usual of design, costume, props, etc, marvellous. Definitely a film for two or three viewings. Doesn’t have the naive charm of Time Bandits – in fact has no charm at all – but is a spirited, inventive, enormously intriguing work of imagination made celluloid.