It was Hiroshima mon amour, regarded as the instigator of the French new wave,  last Sunday, and tonight, five days later, we watched Room at the Top, similarly regarded as the instigator of the British new wave. France, in the form of the great Simone Signoret, links the two. I have great difficulty in getting my youngsters to understand just how repressed British society was not so long ago (or so it seems to me). When Laurence Harvey (played by Joe Lampton) gets beaten up for his passion in this film, or Tom Curtis (played by Richard Attenborough) gets beaten up for his equally idiosyncratic passion in The Angry Silence, are their experiences so very far from the stoning and throat-cutting of ‘the widow’ in Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek? Whenever I see a British ‘new wave’ film, with its inevitable depictions of claustrophic communities, I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s observation that ‘there is only one good thing about a small town; you hate it, and you want to get out’…