This week Brief Encounter celebrates its eightieth anniversary. A lot of the credit for its extraordinary longevity belongs to its producer Tony Havelock-Allan, although when I interviewed him back in 2000 my abiding memory was of a man who was far too modest to make any great claims for himself. Even when he did take credit for something, he managed to do so in a self-deprecating way. So the title, for example: We didn’t know what to call the film. Still Life  was obviously

“One has one’s roots after all, hasn’t one?” says Dolly Messiter.¹ Laura briefly wishes her annoying neighbour were dead, but Dolly is quite right. Even Brief Encounter had its roots. It was an adaptation of Noël Coward’s short play, Still Life , which was performed as part of the Tonight at 8.30 cycle of one-act dramas at the Phoenix Theatre in 1936. But really to get to the roots of it, one needs to go back further to an often quoted poem by Ernest Dowson , first publis