BARRY Norman, Britain’s best-known film critic, is entering new territory on Thursday in Helmsley.

Billed as An Evening With Barry Norman, the event will be a sort of dinner date with Barry.

More precisely, the evening at the Black Swan Hotel encompasses dinner, coffee and Barry’s cinema memoirs for £37.50, as the silver-screen expert “reveals sensational stories and secrets of the stars, from love quarrels between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to the antics of screen legends John Wayne, Robert De Niro, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michelle Pfeiffer, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger”.

“Normally I do these shows in theatres but there’s no reason why these things shouldn’t be done in a more informal way,” says Barry.

So informal that, at the time of this interview, he was not sure which would come first: the platter or the chatter?

It will be dinner, then Barry, the hotel has since confirmed. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how it pans out. It seems rather a neat idea, and if it works well, it would be good to do it elsewhere,” he says.

Once the voice of film on BBC1, Barry is 76 now and does not frequent cinemas regularly. Gone are his days of seeing film upon film. “Seventy per cent of anything is not really up to much…and I had to watch all that! There was a time when for two weeks you wouldn’t see anything that was worth watching but there was always the hope that the next one you saw would make all the dross worthwhile,” he says. “I got bored quite often and there’s no reason to say otherwise. A lot of films are boring.”

Such as? “No, I won’t name them. I’ll leave people to draw up their own list,” says Barry, who will discuss clips from his favourite films at Tuesday’s event.

Often it is said a critic feels more satisfaction dismissing a rotten movie, but Barry demurs. “I think the appreciation of a good film is more important. They are the testing ones because you can’t be funny about them, otherwise you’re giving the impression that they’re not very good, so you have to find a way of telling people to go and see something without writing a review that’s just humorous,” he says.

“It’s so much easier – and pleasurable – to write wittily about a bad film when you’ve just wasted two hours of your life.”

Barry would wish for cinema to be analysed more seriously both in print and on television. “You look around and for the serious newspapers there are still serious critics, but for the less serious papers, their critics are only interested in saying ‘Look at me’ – and every generation has someone trying to show how clever they are by being controversial,” he says.

“I do think that television generally doesn’t take cinema seriously, regarding it as entertainment, not an artform, when in fact it was the greatest artform of the 20th century.

“Now film companies are run by accountants and it’s all about the bottom dollar, so it’s interesting that the films that win the Oscars now are independently made.”

Barry declines to offer tips to Claudia Winkleman as she prepares to take over Film 2010 from Jonathan Ross. “All I can do is talk about what I tried to do, which was to talk seriously but never solemnly about cinema and share my likes and also my dislikes of movies with other people, treating it as a serious artform in the same way that theatre is taken seriously.

“Too often it’s now about getting the big star on the show, so you very rarely get a true appraisal because if you don’t praise the film, you won’t get the star.

“Who knows if the new Film 2010 may go back to the old format, but I shall watch with interest how it progresses, and it would be great if it returned to how it used to be.”

An Evening With Barry Norman, Black Swan Hotel, Helmsley, May 20, 7pm for 7.30pm. Tickets: £37.50, including dinner and coffee; phone 01439 770466. Dress code: smart-casual.