Sometimes I have nothing to say (you might have noticed!) and sometimes too much.

This week there was plenty with Trump being acquitted and not impeached, the Government trying to rush in legislation to stop terrorists serving only half a sentence and - something we will look at closer later - its intention to reintroduce good bus services.

But then Kirk Douglas died.

It would hardly have been expected. He was 103. But it was one phrase that set me off. He was described by a reporter as "the last survivor of Hollywood's Golden Era."

I turned 70 this week so I enjoyed that golden era during the first part of my childhood until the late 1960s when everyone seemed to get angry and "real" and tragic films about the Vietnam War, or films like Midnight Cowboy or even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meant we left the cinema slightly more depressed than when we went in.

Not that there were not sad, depressing or thought-provoking films when we were young. It was just that we were too young to realise what was going on.

Not long ago I re-watched Raintree County to discover that it was all about slavery, pre-marital sex and insanity.I was eight when I watched it and my abiding memory is Elizabeth Taylor in a beautiful yellow dress.

I was living in what was Northern Rhodesia at the time and, if there were classifications nobody seemed to worry about them including our parents.

Saturday afternoon was when we went to the pictures or the bioscope as we knew it.

It didn't matter what the film was - it was the experience that counted.

The show would usually start with a cartoon. Then there would be the gripping serial which would end with he hero about to fall of a cliff or plane about to plough into a mountain - and we had to go back next week to see what happened.

Somewhere along the line we would get the Pathe news (or that might just have been when we went to the "bio" or the "scopes" with our parents at night.Then there was the "big picture"

In the days before Northern Rhodesia became Zambia and, therefore, the days before decimalisation, we had shilling (about 10p) which bought us our ticket, a chocolate bar and a fizzy drink.

The screens were huge, the pictures big (Kirk in I Spartacus, for instance) and the darkness was only lightened by the beam coming from the projector box

I still love going to the pictures but it is so much more sterile now, for want of a better word. The screens are smaller and it is somehow obvious you are watching video not reel film.

And now you don't even have to go to the pictures. You can see films on TV, you can even watch them on your bloomin' phone. It's magic in its own right but it has removed much of the old movie magic, too.

RIP Kirk and all the other larger than life stars who gave us so much pleasure for so many years!