With a new cartridge loaded into our Halina Super 8 cine camera, my sister and I once made a short film about four children who fly to the moon in a home-made spaceship (consisting of a ZX Spectrum resting on an upturned laundry basket, housed inside a small shed in Watford). Like budding Paul Whitehouses we played two characters each. My sister played Vicki and Karen (one, a chilled out hippy type, the other, a pigtailed saboteur with some kind of sneezing allergy), and I played McKell (key character trait: to exude effortless cool like Officer Carey Mahoney) and Philippe (the brains behind the lunar rocket, with a name that made him sound like a flamboyant, French hairdresser).

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