The One Room With A View Show

The iTunes store is a dense jungle of content. It has become overgrown with mp3s and mp4s, singles, albums, compilations, movies and TV shows, books and even collections for University study. But machete your way past the snapping tendrils of Lady Gaga, jump over the frothing rapids of X-Factor winners’ songs, leap across the crumbling gorge of reuniting boybands, and you might find there are a couple of new blokes on the block – namely myself, Christopher Preston, and my silky voiced partner in crime, Mr Dan Orton.

Together, we are the incredibly proud hosts of OneRoomWithAView.com’s brand spanking new, absolutely official, companion podcast: The One Room With A View Show.

Courtesy of Associated Press/Hammer Films

I first met my co-host back in January 2010. Dan looks like Stephen Merchant and sounds like Christopher Lee so he, quite obviously, made an instant impression on me. Right from our very first conversation I was struck by two of his features: his distinctive voice and his insatiable passion for trivia. Every time we met up he would reach into that top hat of a mind of his and produce a shiny new fact I hadn’t heard before. To this day, he remains a furious volcano of information; spewing lavaic tidbits whenever he gets the opportunity to do so.

It quickly transpired that the largest of our common interests was the cinema. We spoke about her as if she was an old mutual friend; someone each of us had met a long time ago, on different and dusty roads, who had captured our hearts and taught us both so much. We discussed films, we debated films. We roared in disparity, we laughed in agreement. Our love of cinema burned most other things away as our conversations on this beautiful medium consumed everything.

An outlet for these chats came in the form of the student radio station, XpressionFM. We joined their presenter team in the winter of 2010 as the hosts of Friday Night Film: a two hour weekly show whose diet consisted solely of the fruit of the movies. Our very first show was broadcast on the 12th November 2010 and we concluded the series with a special programme on 18th May 2012 (both of us would graduate from University life shortly after).

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

Between those two dates we viewed and chewed on hours and hours of films and had the opportunity to interview many different guests (one of which was an actor involved in the Academy Award winning film The Fighter, another of which was Dan’s very opinionated father). I even dragged myself through a non-stop Twilight marathon, all in the name of film-centric radio.

But what has all of this got to do with OneRoomWithAView.com and its nursing podcast?

Friday Night Film may have retired in that barmy, Olympic summer of 2012, but its format is the main ancestor of The One Room With A View Show: they share a heritage, a DNA; the same blood flows through both’s veins.

So, what does The One Room With A View Show aim to offer you? Exactly the same thing the blog you are reading does: an unpretentious, chatty, loving and, above all, fun look at the wonderful world of cinema. Our main feature, the spine of our show, ‘Some Film Old, Some Film New’ (a Ronseal of a segment if ever there was such a thing) looks at two different movies – always a brand new release and a film from yesteryear – that share some form of link: director, actors and themes being some of the less tenuous examples (tune in for the more tenuous ones).

Dan (left) and Christopher (right)

Other, often bizarrely named, features discuss film’s largest questions, look to its bright future and into its magical past, examine the great library of world cinema, applaud soundtracks and scores, and cover a wide, and constantly evolving, range of further cinematic terrain. If it is to do with the silver screen, colour us interested.

Our very first episode is available to download, completely free of charge, right here, right now, with new episodes going up every two weeks. If you enjoy it, why not click Subscribe? If you really enjoy it, why not spread the word and give us a little mention on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media of your choice? We’d love to hear from you, and can be contacted via this website’s Twitter page, or you can even email us directly at: [email protected].

All that is left to say is thanks for reading, cheers for listening, and we look forward to chinwagging about the flicks with you all soon.