When you are a teenager, the aesthetic of your parents is as terrifying as their sex life. Most of us are spared seeing our parents have sex but their embarrassing taste is everywhere we look. Thinking about the suburban homes of the 1980s with their wall-to-wall carpet, decorated toaster covers and impressionist reproductions still makes me feel claustrophobic. For others it’s sea-grass matting and Che Guevara prints they can’t abide. Either way the childhood home is furnished with the values of our parents. Delicate flowers from the faux Laura Ashley wallpaper crawled all over me while I sulked in my room. My parents’ taste imposed itself upon my body, ruining my black clothes, itchier than any mohair jumper.

So as an angsty teenager, I was pretty pleased when I saw the 1986 film Dogs in Space. The chaos and eclectic characters filled me with the hope that I might one day escape incarceration by my parents and watch Countdown with other misfits. The characters and scenarios are now familiar. There’s the Lothario listening to Brian Eno and the student who can’t get any work done because everyone else is partying. There are arguments about politics and who’s been cooking meat in the frying pan. The only vaguely appealing character endsup dead, which fortunately was not something I encountered in the share households I was to inhabit during my twenties and early thirties.