When I started in Wardour Street, I had Frank Pool of Rank at one end of the Street and Nat Cohen of EMI at the other end. Now there are 25 or 30 places where film-makers can go to look for money for their films.” He shook his head, as if overcome with sentimentality. And if both of them said no to a project, then that was it, you couldn’t go anywhere else. Now he seems awestruck as he surveys what the Blair administration has done, appointing a Minister of Film and offering business investors attractive tax breaks for putting money into British movies.”That’s far and away the best thing that’s happened,” he glows. You know what she calls me? My name isn’t `Granddad’, it’s `GranddadinAmerica’, it’s one word. I don’t mind that, but I would like to be `GranddadinEngland’.”Sweet The last reason is political Mr Parker is a long-standing Labour supporter (“May the First was such a great night I was watching it at home in LA in broad daylight.

There’s a channel called C-Span which took the whole BBC coverage. I sat there for five hours, occasionally jumping in the air with excitement. My favourite moment? Mr Portillo…”) After years of truculent union activity in the early Eighties, lobbying the government for a more enlightened approach to film subsidy and tax concessions (“I was always trucking up Whitehall because I could be relied on to be unpleasant and aggressive”), Parker gave up in disgust and frustration. The effect is of a great door slamming open rather than shut. Months after I saw it, Parker was still working on the laser and video versions, “and when you’ve done a film that’s such a huge undertaking, you need to rest You can’t keep churning them out; I can’t anyway. Three of my children live here [one daughter and two sons; they're respectively a painter, a documentary maker and a composer; a fourth son is studying playwriting at Columbia University in New York] and I’ve got a granddaughter called Lily that I rarely see.

Then lately, I had a thought – that if I didn’t come back to England now, well, there might be a very small memorial service for me at the Directors’ Guild on Sunset Boulevard one day, and I didn’t want that.” Surely you don’t mean, O gruff, Anglo-American roustabout, that you were were a teensy bit…”Homesick? Yeah, simple as that. I do admire directors who come up to bat every year, like Woody Allen, who’s extraordinarily prolific. I spoke to him on the phone once, to ask his advice after my first film. Oddly enough, his advice was to make British films…”The other reasons why this busy, transatlantic control freak took the job are connected with home, too “Yeah, there is a personal reason. You see, I never felt I was actually living in the United States I always thought I was just on location I conned myself into believing that. Most films involve a six-day working week and when I’m on a film set, I’m there all the time, I’ve little time for anything else So I’ll often be away.’ But it’s Catch-22.