Last week for reasons I can’t explain I got all nostalgic and looked up Bill Collins Wikipedia page. It was probably Saturday night and I was probably moaning about how they don’t show good movies on TV anymore.

Generally my tv watching goes like this – looks rubbish, really rubbish, super violent, boring, super scary, what even is that. Oh Carlton Heston great let’s watch that for a while.

Of course I know a lot of the classic Hollywood movies because as a kid I grew watching Bill Collins Golden Years of Hollywood on a Saturday night.

Saturday nights were pretty fun at our house. We made an 80s Aussie version of Pizza with a meat sauce base. It was delicious. We’d watch Hey Hey it’s Saturday and we were allowed to stay up a bit and watch a movie. Mum and Dad always said to get into our pyjamas and clean our teeth first – so they could carry us to bed if we fell asleep.

I think this is why we sometimes groaned at his long introductions because it meant we’d see less of the movie before falling asleep. But eventually the movie would start and we’d be transported to Casablanca or Paris after the war or the America during the Civil War.

This was how I came to love musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein movies were great. State Fair was a favourite. I could never stay awake for all of the Sound of Music. Watching Gene Kelly tap dance, inspired me at age of 16 to take it up for myself. After watching Roman Holiday I knew I was going to visit the mouth of truth if I ever made it to Rome.

Hitchcock Season was the best – I’ve never forgotten watching Rear Window for the first time. For obvious reasons, I was restricted to the not terrifying for little people movies, so no the Birds or Psycho, which I still have never seen.

One of the best things about Saturday night movies was having an intermission in the middle, where you could make a cup of milo and go to the toilet. Often this was also the cue for me to go to bed as the littlest. Until I was a teenager I’d seen half of some of the best films ever made from Hollywood’s golden age.

Nostalgia isn’t always a good thing, it gives you rose coloured glasses about what the world was like. What I remember mostly though was these movies were fun, violence happened but was not gory, men wore hats and were effortlessly cool, and Audrey Hepburn was the most gorgeous woman on the planet. Oh and there was usually a happy ending.