Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink back into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises; everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over whatever gets them though. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenburgs, Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.

I thought the entirety of this movie can basically be summed up in four words: “Psycho preys on douchebag.”

Cesar Romero as the Joker gets perhaps the least to do, though he certainly seems to be having the time of his life responding to the Penguin’s nautical submarine commands with an unhinged “Yo-ho!” or fluttering in terror while being stared down by Catwoman’s thoroughly inoffensive-looking house-cat. Frank Gorshin as the Riddler is, as always, incandescently insane – after he accidentally hits the Batcopter with one of his skyrwriting riddle missiles, his wonderment is so intense that it blurs the line between ecstasy and disappointment. Burgess Meredith as the waddling Penguin delivers some of the film’s best lines, declaiming with squawking relish as he contemplates the possible death of his henchmen, “Every one of them has a mother!” or urging his submarine crew to dive with the immortal exhortation, “Run silent, run deep!”

From the very outset of work on the film we all discussed means of photographically depicting an extraterrestrial creature in a manner that would be as mind-boggling as the being itself. And it soon became apparent that you cannot imagine the unimaginable. All you can do is try to represent it in an artistic manner that will convey something of its quality. That’s why we settled on the black monolith — which is, of course, in itself something of a Jungian archetype, and also a pretty fair example of “minimal art.”

‘Beverley Skeggs, a professor of sociology at Goldsmith’s, University of London who has conducted studies into the representation of class and gender on reality television, believes it is, at root, a question of human connection. “I think the community feeling is part of the appeal of this kind of show,” she says. “It’s expressing a form of social value – people connect to other people who have the same values, who behave in the same way. We do get swept up in it, wanting to be behind somebody, wanting them to do well. That’s why producers will milk the hard-luck story – those little snippets of someone working in Tesco – because all that intertextual stuff enables us to feel we have this sort of connection.”