There was a sense in the mid-1980s that the fortunes of the British film industry had reached a new nadir. The vanishing cinema audience, the contracting domestic production sector, the collapse of Goldcrest and the withdrawal of Thorn-EMI from the film business contributed to a general sense of malaise. The dismantling of state support represented by the abolition of the Eady levy and the winding up of the National Film Finance Corporation confirmed that the government had finally abandoned any policy of continuing to prop up the ailing industry. There was no better indication of the decline of the British film industry since the heyday of Alexander Korda and the Rank Organisation than the fact that the most active financing and production group in the mid-1980s was the film arm of a television broadcaster specialising in low-cost films (Channel Four Films). British cinema was a shadow of its former self: it had become little more than a cottage industry producing a handful of films a year for a domestic market that more than ever was dominated by American interests.

Against this background the promotion of ‘British Film Year’ in 1985–6 now seems at best ironic and at worst utterly hubristic. This was an industry-led initiative to promote the idea of cinema-going: its aim was ‘to attract the lost millions back to the cinemas’. British Film Year involved a series of events – screenings, exhibitions, festivals and workshops – co-ordinated through the British Film Institute and the network of regional film theatres across the United Kingdom. In many respects it recalled the ‘British Film Weeks’ of 1924, not least in that it offered a cultural response to what was really an economic crisis in the film industry.