Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a film critic, perhaps I should say the film critic, her

influence on her profession has been so profound. Since 1939 her forthright and

pithy comments have served as a natural accompaniment to the pleasures of going to the cinema in Britain.

Today at the age of 90 she still watches three or four films a week, reviewing them for Punch magazine,

and she writes a weekly film guide for the

Sunday Times.

Film producers should feel grateful for her addiction.

Like all good critics, she has given far more to the art she's observed through the years than she has ever taken away.

She is Dylis Powell.

Dylis, 67 years, a film critic, is it possible to say how many films you've seen in that time?

It is really impossible I have seen thousands of course some years ago quite a few years ago I was asked how many

and we calculated it was about 11,000 but it must be more like 20,000 by now.

And you still look forward to the next one?

I do.

I mean sometimes because I know my sort of instinct by now is not going to be

terribly interesting but I try to get over by disappointment. But is there still

a magic for you in going to the cinema? Is it still, do you still have a sense of occasion about it?

Well, not exactly a sense of occasion because after all I go, I see two films on Monday, perhaps two or three on Tuesday.

So you can't make an occasion even if you know

by experience it's going to be a marvelous film. But it's always a pleasure. It's always a kind

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