Knocking on the door of fame and glamour

THE MOST expensive front door in the British Isles is going on sale on 9 December. It is being auctioned at Christie's in London and is expected to reach pounds 6,000, despite being nondescript, plainly designed and made of wood, rather than being (as you might expect) some posh compound of ebony and mother-of-pearl. The only thing going for it is that it's blue and just-about-recognisable as the front door through which Hugh Grant wafts and dithers in the hit movie Notting Hill.

The door, and the house attached to it, used to be the property of Richard Curtis, who wrote the screenplay, edited by his wife and co-habitee, Emma Freud.

With a shrewdness usually found only among Swiss arbitrageurs, they sold the house to Caroline Freud, ex-wife of the Freud dynasty's most celebrated son Matthew, just after the movie was released.

The new owners apparently became fed up with movie fans banging on the door, in the hope (for we are dealing with sick, sick people here) of Mr Grant coming to the door in propria persona and stammering at them adorably.

The role of the celebrity house fixture in our culture has not, perhaps, been given sufficient attention. But only a philistine would deny its importance. The Notting Hill door, let me remind you, is not just a lump of wood, God no. It's practically a character. It's the mild, apparently neutral backdrop against which the most astounding plot development is enacted, namely the impetuous kiss Ms Roberts lands on Grant's stiff, public-school chops before disappearing from his life.

It's the door that later opens, like a screen wipe, to announce her presence as a fleeing refugee from the howling media pack. And the door that opens to reveal a ghastly, baying, flashbulb-popping multitude. The door through which Rhys Ifans, as the Welsh underwear model, emerges to media stardom. It's always there - in a movie centrally concerned with flight and refuge - as the image of sanctuary and the portal of betrayal. It's the most eloquent piece of carved wood since the sledge in Citizen Kane.

You think I exaggerate the importance of doors? Not a bit. In Dublin, where they better understand artistic glory-by-association, someone discovered the city corporation was pulling down No 7 Eccles Street on the north side of town. It was the site of, if I remember rightly, a nursing home for nuns. But, as generations of Joyce fans know, it's also the address of Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and the final destination ("Ithaca") of the wandering Leopold and Stephen.

Unbothered by the problem that it was the real door of the mythical home of a fictional couple, a gang of bravoes rescued it from a skip and ferried it into the heart of Dublin, where it was cemented into the wall of The Bailey, a pub in Anne Street, remaining as a talking point ("I thought it was the way to the gents. I was yankin' the handle for half a bloody hour...") for years.

I can't understand why there isn't a ready market for celluloid-related furniture, fixtures and fittings. If Marilyn Monroe's dresses can fetch a half-million dollars at auction, why shouldn't James Stewart's window in Rear Window? Or the TV in Poltergeist, the shower curtain in Psycho, the carpet in Last Tango In Paris (stains included), the toy cupboard in ET, the staircase up to Hell in The Exorcist, the ironing-board in the Woodfall production of Look Back in Anger...

I trust the people at Christie's will bung me a few quid for this lucrative suggestion. Or if not, at least treat me, gratis, to my own favourite door in the movies - the nasty, housing-estate front door of the Rabbitte family in Alan Parker's The Commitments, which opens to reveal successive waves of aspirant Dublin-wideboy musicians. Does anyone ever go up to the inner wastes of Kilbarrack and bang on that door?