About

My name is Sue. I live in Cyprus with my husband of more than forty years, and one cat. We are empty-nesters with two adult sons and two young grandchildren in the UK. 

When I was growing up, my father loved watching films on television. I was less interested, although I very much liked some of his favourites: Danny Kaye's 'The Court Jester', for instance, or the well-known classic 'The Sound of Music', with Julie Andrews. 

My father was an early adopter of technology, where possible, and acquired his first video recorder/player in the spring of 1980. I was married later that year, and it took us a bit longer to buy our first VCR. I would sometimes watch light sitcoms in the evenings. But I was out at work all day with an hour's bus journey home (and then we had to eat...) so I was less inclined to sit and watch a film that might last a couple of hours or more. 

We did go to the cinema a few times; I remember seeing ET in the early 1980s, as well as some of the Star Wars series. I even went to see some James Bond films with my husband. But I didn't like the noisiness of a cinema, with people unwrapping sweets or rustling bags of crisps. And I hated the smell of sweet popcorn. 

We moved to Cyprus in 1987 with two young sons. We had a VHS machine by then - Betamax, sadly, had lost the publicity battle, and if we wanted to buy films on tape, it had to be VHS. But they seemed quite expensive, and took up a lot of space, and the quality wasn't as good as TV.  And my husband was convinced that DVDs were going to become popular before too long, with superior quality and taking up far less space. 

He was, of course, correct. At the start of the new millennium, with some birthday or Christmas money, we bought our first DVD player. There were quite a few online sites that sold DVDs, with free postage to Cyprus. I checked regularly for special offers. I wasn't all that keen on watching them myself - I was more of a reader - but thought our sons, in their teens, should be aware of some of the great classic films. I bought 'Mary Poppins', and 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang', and 'ET', and 'Back to the Future'... and many more. I thought perhaps we might collect twenty or thirty...

At the last count, our DVD collection numbered around 570.  Of those, nearly a hundred are collections of TV show episodes, many of them from the 1980s. In 2006, after our first son had left home, I decided to start watching DVDs as a way of doing something with my husband in an evening.  Not every week; not even every other week at first. But I managed thirteen in 2006, including some I had not seen before. 

I kept a note of what I thought of each one I watched, and eventually turned that into this blog. I have a similar blog for reviewing books that I read, which I updated much more frequently as I read a great deal more. As evidence of this: the book blog goes back to April 1999, and has, as I write this, over 2500 reviews of books I have read in that period.  (An average of around 100 per year).

 This DVD review blog, by contrast, which goes back to 2006, has only 430 posts. An average of around 22 per year. 

Blogging is a hobby for me, and I write this primarily for my own interest, to see how my tastes change and to record impressions of films or TV shows that I would have forgotten. I'm pleased to see that most posts have attracted at least a handful of visitors. I have added Amazon UK affiliate links so as to give a bit of visual interest to what would otherwise be text only. If anyone ever buys anything through one of those links (it hasn't happened yet with this blog...) I would earn a few pennies. 

If you want to get in touch, please comment below, or on one of the reviews. 

'About page' last updated August 22nd 2024