Well I write this column looking out on snow for the first time in a long while. We rarely experience it these days and watching some drivers skidding around looking helpless, I guess they are not up to it. I am sure my older readers remember that awful winter back in I think 1963 when the snow was on the ground for about three months. As a youngster I recall shovelling the snow away from the front door to get to school and ice forming on the inside of my bedroom as we had a coal fire and not central heating. Us post war babes knew how to survive!

So what was happening at Elstree Studios between October 1963 and September 1964? You can gather I have kept a record of everything filmed at the studio from 1926 until 1993, when it closed for a couple of years. I am less in touch now so am more hazy about what has been shot there in recent years.

Back then Elstree only had six sound stages. They were all large but times were changing. The studio also had the burden of carrying several hundred permanent staff and red ink was common on the balance sheets. Today the facility has less than twenty employees.

At this particular time Elstree relied heavily on Hammer films and television series, some of which you may recall. Two other productions also occupied the sound stages. One was called Wonderful Life and I guess saw the end of a trilogy of movies a young Cliff Richard made at the Studio, the others being The Young Ones and Summer Holiday.

The other was a Roger Corman horror movie called The Masque Of The Red Death, in which that old ham veteran Vincent Price was able to chew up the scenery in his own loveable, slightly camp style. I met Vincent on the set of another Elstree film about 17 years later but that tale is for another week.

The three television series occupying stage space were the long-running The Saint, starring, of course, Roger Moore, and two less remembered series. The first was a drama series called The Human Jungle, which had a great theme tune and starred Herbert Lom as a shrink. Many years later I had the pleasure to meet Herbert and I thought he was a great actor in both dramatic and comedy roles.

The there was Gideon's Way, which starred John Gregson and used many real-life locations in London and elsewhere. It was about a Scotland Yard detective and he gave such a realistic performance. Sadly John died young from a heart attack whilst out walking on holiday but on a lighter note it was great to recently meet Giles Watling who played his young son in the series. I knew his dad Jack Watling and both are lovely men.

Now we turn our attention to the three Hammer films, who back in the 1960s were the masters of fantasy films on a budget. I prefer not to use the phrase 'horror movies' in respect to Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff, who all told me they disliked that label.

She, starring Ursula Andress along with Lee and Cushing, was a big budget effort by Hammer's standards and apparently cost £323,000, which today could be the cost of an advert shoot.

Then Hammer persuaded a once-famous but now drunken old Hollywood and Broadway star Tallaluh Bankhead to make a thriller called Fanatic. I met its director once and he told me she loved a drink and once turned up in the dressing room of a young newcomer appearing in the movie minus any clothes. His name is Donald Sutherland, now a distinguished veteran, and I suspect he still remembers!

Finally there was Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb, which in the old days would have been called a B-movie designed as part of a double bill to be shown at cinemas. One of the stars was Ronald Howard, who I interviewed many years later. You may not know the name but he was the son of the golden era star Leslie Howard and played Sherlock Holmes on 1950s television. The Mummy was played by Dickie Owen, who oddly enough was married to my stand-in English teacher at Hillside Senior School when they were filming.

You see growing up in Borehamwood I could never escape that silly but magical world of movies and television. I must end now as must find some snow boots as if I fall over I don't bounce as well as I did back in 1963.