Half A Million Views – And Counting

Shameless, I know. Egotistical? I plead guilty. But since there’s no financial reward in writing this Blog, I take pleasure in its increasing popularity. I started writing this Blog in 2020 and my first year’s figures amounted to a scant 1,648 views. Certainly nothing to write home about and definitely no inkling that I would hit a grand total of 565,000 views over the six years of the Blog’s existence. I would have been happy to settle for a regular 10,000-20,000 a year.

Luckily, readers had more faith than me and by my third year I was staring at an annual total of just short of 50,000. The following year I topped 75,000 and in 2024 it was a shade below 125,000.

Then came a bonanza. For the year 2025 I registered a phenomenal 301,000 views, more in that single year than cumulatively for the previous five years.

People often ask me why I latched on to the 1960s for the core of my reviews. It’s a question I often ask myself. Although the 1960s were my formative years, I didn’t spend much time at the cinema. I grew up in the new town of Cumbernauld in Scotland which didn’t have a cinema, even though the town planners must have been aware that Scotland had the highest cinema attendance per head of population in the whole of Europe. When I moved to Dumbarton, which had two cinemas, one burned down. Although I remember taking a detour on my journey home from school to stare at the stills on display outside the Rialto, incursions inside were rare. So maybe I’m just catching up on what I missed.

And although I’d written several books on films of the 1960s – one each about The Magnificent Seven (1960),  The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and another devoted to the westerns of 1969, it wasn’t until I watched all the movies that comprised The Magnificent 60s: The 100 Most Popular Films of a Revolutionary Decade that my appetite was whetted for more.

I’ve got a huge DVD and VHS arsenal so that was a good place to start. I didn’t have any plan. I just watched what I fancied. Occasionally, I’d plunder TCM, Talking Pictures and other television channels and streamers. Since I still attend the cinema on a Monday, I add to the mix with reviews of contemporary films.

In this indiscriminate fashion, I’ve got to know a huge number of movies that I would probably never had an initial inclination to watch. Pictures such as Fraulein Doktor (1968) or A Dandy in Aspic (1968) or Invitation to a Gunfigfhter (1964) or Guns of Darkness (1962) or The Way West (1967), all underrated at the time – and since, which I am delighted to give a positive fillip. As such films turn up intermittently on streamers or television stations I find I am often the first port of call for people wanting a review of such pictures.

Because several of my books had been about the making of movies, I decided to sporadically investigate, on a smaller scale, how certain pictures were made and those “Behind the Scenes” articles have become a very popular element of the Blog.

Where do my fans come from? United States leads the way followed by China, then the United Kingdom, Thailand, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Germany and Singapore. But I’ve got at least one reader in virtually every country in the world.

I’ve no idea how people find this Blog because I’m not on social media. The Blog isn’t represented on X or Facebook or Instagram so I can only assume it’s a version of word-of-mouth.

Here’s to the next half a million.