Watch guilty pleasures inside the ‘Cinema’..!

What do you mean you’ve never watched Inside Cinema? Call yourself a film buff?

Small can be beautiful, and there’s certainly something rather delightful about the BBC’s bitesized programmes dedicated to the big screen.

Made by the production company Little Dots, these shows have been available on the BBC iPlayer for some time, with each edition narrated by a renowned film critic who offers a brief insight into an aspect of the movies that they hold dear.

Subject titles include Pubs On Film, Lynchian Nightmares, The Dolly Zoom and Cats Entertainment.

Or at least that’s how the series started anyway. In more recent months, the format has been expanded so that each programme can offer more in-depth investigations of its subject.

Earlier this year we were treated to Meet the Family, in which Catherine Bray, with help from narrator Kathy Burke, offered an idiosyncratic look at how directors and screenwriters have tackled multi-generational tales, from Home Alone to Gosford Park. Then, to tie in with Black History Month, it offered profiles of directors Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay and Jordan Peele.

Now Bray is back to celebrate the films we love, but are too ashamed to admit it; comedian Mae Martin is also on hand to narrate the proceedings.

Guilty pleasures are a strange phenomenon – after all, why should we feel ashamed about admitting we like a particular film? Why does it matter if our friends laugh at our tastes? Those are questions too tricky to answer here, but suffice to say, the vast majority of us all have a title we love but would rather not discuss.

Bray and Martin offer their own views on the matter while taking a look at some of the films that might be included in anybody’s guilty pleasures list.

Among them are they’re-so-bad-they’re-good offerings such as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Room.

Cult favourites such as Showgirls, The Man Who Saved the World (aka Turkish Star Wars) and 1990: The Bronx Warriors are also considered, while the Sharknado franchise’s credentials are questioned – it was clearly made with the intention of becoming a cult hit, so can it really stand alongside accidental disasters such as Jaws: The Revenge?

As certain issues depicted in several older films, including race and gender, begin to feel outdated, some viewers consider enjoying them morally wrong, while being a fan of a director caught up in controversy also goes down like a lead balloon; thankfully Bray and Martin are on hand to tell us whether it’s alright to separate productions from the people who made them, and to take into consideration the period in which certain projects were made.

Finally there’s a look at the very notion of guilty pleasures, and whether it’s time it should be retired so that we can simply enjoy the things we like without fear of being judged.

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