Wilson's passion for retro industrial lighting was just a hobby. Then came commissions from Lily Allen and Hollywood.

Small-budget film-makers will soon roll cameras alongside producers of blockbuster movies after studios giant Pinewood Shepperton revealed plans to invest millions of pounds in British films.

As Ridley Scott prepares two new Alien prequels, he tells James Mottram why, at 72, he isn't ready to slow down yet

The Clash of the Titans due for release this weekend, was one of a number of movies filmed at Pinewood and Shepperton studios during a resurgent 2009 for British cinema, their owner said.

An award-winning film editor, Hungarian émigré and friend of Alexander Korda, Teddy Darvas was a dedicated film enthusiast who worked with David Lean, the Boulting Brothers and Vittorio De Sica. I first met him when I was a film editor in the 1960s and renewed my acquaintance when researching a book on David Lean in the '90s. I found him such a fount of information that I went back repeatedly.

US astronauts travel to the moon, which they discover is inhabited by attractive young women in black tights. These women want to come to Earth, take the planet over and get rid of men, whom they consider of no use except as sex objects. This is the plot of the much reviled 3-D movie, Cat-Women of The Moon (1953). The movie may not have been up to much ("juvenile" and "wholly lacking in verve" was how the Monthly Film Bulletin described it, "breathtakingly bad" was the Village Voice verdict when the film was revived in the late Eighties), but the potted synopsis hints at just why film-makers have always been so intrigued by the Moon. In cinema, the Moon stands for the exotic and the unexplored, whether that is defined in geographical or sexual terms, with curiosity or with disgust. It's a place where monsters may lurk or – at least in Fifties B-movies – femmes fatales in Lycra. Is there someone up there, looking down on us?

Thirteen-year-old Simon, the central character in Beautiful People, a new BBC2 comedy series, is a delicate flower struggling to blossom in what he sees as the cultural desert of Reading, circa 1997. Incapable of opening a fridge door without breaking into a show tune, he is appalled by the vulgarity and ordinariness of his surroundings. His sense of horror peaks when the family's blind lodger, known as Aunty Hayley, gives him a purple and pink shell suit as a present. "Two fashion pointers," he sighs. "Never wear nylon. And never wear nylon bought by a blind person."

A string of blockbusters including the new James Bond film and a werewolf movie called The Wolfman sent profits at Pinewood Shepperton film studios up by a third in the first half of the year.

Perhaps it has disappeared through a window into another universe, like its characters.

Geoffrey Macnab asks why the production of so many 'home-grown' movies has drifted overseas

In `Sleepy Hollow', Tim Burton casts Christina Ricci completely against type. The director and his star explain why to David Eimer

An ordinary street corner in Devon? Look again. TV sitcom locations are everywhere in London.

WITH 200 days to go until the grand opening, the creators of the Dome revealed its attractions to the world yesterday, outlining details of each of the 14 zones that will make up the New Millennium Experience.

Marlowe and Shakespeare's original Elizabethan playhouse has been given a hi-tech restoration.