It happened today - June 8, 2015

Been slimed lately? Then you’ll look back fondly, or wistfully, at the cinema debut on June 8 1984 of the instant classic Ghostbusters.

I confess to enjoying the movie enormously. The lead actors are all marvellous even if Bill Murray does show some of his regrettably self-indulgent tendency to chew the scenery, it has many unforgettable scenes and some superb lines.

To be frank, if I’d been the director, it would have gone in a very different direction. I think the core of a great ghost story is the reason for the haunting, whether justified or as malevolent after death as the spectre had been in life. I want to know why that sweet-to-terrifying librarian was there, what the science was behind ghosts and their intermittent capacity to intrude on our world and so on. But as Hollywood has yet to call, and the movie apparently made money anyway, I must be content with what is, despite my lack of directorial input, a classic.

Including one aspect of the film very much in keeping with its appearance in the Reagan years, when deregulation was briefly neither a dirty word nor a pipe dream. In the film, the key villain is no ectoplasmic phantasm but a real, living, breathing… government bureaucrat. A hidebound, red-tape-wielding, disaster-provoking self-righteous tin god from, of all things, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Try that today in Hollywood and see how fast you get slimed by critics, colleagues and the press generally.