The problem with being a film collector is that the technology on which films are preserved keeps changing. I’m not talking about abandoning my DVD library – although I’ll come to that – but my collection of LaserDiscs.

LaserDiscs were a forerunner of DVDs. They were the same size as LPs and you often needed two to capture a long film like Spartacus. The quality was significantly better than VHS and I held screening parties at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush for films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I thought the fact that hardly anyone else had the technology was part of its appeal. But the failure of the format to take off in Europe meant it was quickly killed by the more affordable DVDs when they went on sale 25 years ago this month.

My DVD collection was a combination of classics such as His Girl Friday and lowbrow blockbusters. The reason for the latter is that I discovered a shop in Covent Garden that sold imported American DVDs of Holly-wood films that hadn’t been released in the UK yet. They were regionally encoded and you weren’t supposed to be able to play them on DVD players bought in the UK, but you could get your machine ‘chipped’ to override the encryption. In that way, I could watch Spider-Man 3 a few weeks before it arrived in British cinemas.

My collection really took off when I co-produced How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a film based on my memoir of the same name, and became a member of Bafta. That meant that from mid-November each year, ‘screeners’ would start arriving in the post. These were DVDs of movies their distributors hoped would be nominated for an award that year, including plenty of big, prestige pictures that hadn’t been released yet. At least 100 would arrive in the run-up to Christmas and I painstakingly catalogued them all using different stacks in front of the TV that only I understood. One stack was for titles I hadn’t seen and wanted to see; another for those I’d seen and wanted to see again; a third for films I hadn’t seen and didn’t want to; a fourth for children’s features; and so on. Every time one of my kids watched a movie, they’d either leave it in the DVD player or put it back in the wrong place, which drove me crazy. 

Eventually, my collection became so large that my wife Caroline insisted I re-locate it to the attic, leaving only those films I hadn’t seen. Going through that stack, which by then was several feet high, I realised I was never going to watch most of them. Nearly all were films I thought I ought to see, not ones I anticipated bringing me any pleasure – the DVD equivalent of The Satanic Verses. 

A few years ago, the ‘screeners’ began to dry up as Bafta rolled out its own streaming service. I still have a DVD player next to the TV, but I can’t remember the last time I used it, and my collection is gathering dust in the attic. I have a vague intention of giving my children a crash course in cinematic history one of these days, but realistically I doubt I’ll ever find the time. DVDs have given me a great deal of pleasure over the past 25 years, but the format has become just another redundant technology – the LaserDiscs of the 21st century.