I was just getting dressed while watching the bbc breakfast program, and they had an item about Christmas lunch. People kept saying the word ‘Potatoes’, and I noticed that I automatically thought the word ‘Po-ta-toes’ in response. That is, whenever anyone mentions the vegetable these days, there now seems to be an automatic connection in my brain to the scene in The Lord of the Rings when Sam and Gollum argue about the best way to eat fish. That makes me wonder why. Of course, I’ve loved that passage in Tolkien’s novel since Dad read it to me when I was a child: I remember laughing my head off when I heard Dad speak in Gollum’s voice (which, obviously, wasn’t the same as Andy Sirkis’s, although there are similarities). When I saw Peter Jackson’s rendering of it, translated pretty much word for word onto the big screen, I was thrilled. In fact, I would almost say it constituted a cinephiliac moment for me.

These days, of course, you can find references to that scene almost anywhere: it crops up quite regularly online on various fan pages, and you can even see it in supermarkets. It’s strange to think that something which was once so personal to me – a passage of text which I still vividly remember hearing in my father’s warm, loving voice – is now so widespread. It is now just another part of popular culture, and has become a meme. Just hearing anyone say the word ‘Potatoes’ on the TV is enough to make me think of it apparently, although whether that is due to seeing it crop up so regularly on the web, or in fact stems from my adoration of that scene as a child, is anybody’s guess. Nonetheless I find it interesting how this simple passage in Tolkien’s book has transpired and become something much larger. Cinema has the capacity to take such short pieces of text and magnify them, so that they almost gain a life of their own.