I'd never heard of Steven Spielberg when I settled back against my bed's primped-up pillows, my parent's old black-and-white flickering at the far end of the room.

But that February in 1975, it was ITV's Sunday night movie, and as far as I could tell from the TV Times review, would almost certainly include a car chase. The film started at 7.45pm - with no noticeable fanfare because, after all, it was just a 'made-for-TV' movie - and finished at 9.15pm, just before Two's Company, a successful sitcom starring Donald Sinden and Elaine Stritch.

Instead, dressed only in my pyjamas (I was 13, Okay?), I rang my best friend Pete Castle and gasped: "Did you just watch that film called Duel?"

He hadn't, but next day at school, it turned out a few people had, and even though they weren't really friends of mine - one in fact was two years older than me and an unashamed thug - we bonded.

And what's most interesting, and significant, is that from that day onwards, if I was ever bothered, my new best mate - labelled 'difficult' after he'd assaulted one of the teachers - would take care of them (the last I heard he was in prison, guilty of GBH, but presumably still discerning enough to cry over ET ...) So, as far as Mr Spielberg goes, he saved me from a few good beatings. Nevertheless, his name didn't really mean anything until Jaws was released the following year. And then all of a sudden it meant everything.

So why was Jaws important to me, now that I'd been enjoying the protection of my own bodyguard for the last 12 months?

Well, in short, it enabled me to organise my very first film 'festival'. I persuaded a local fishmonger to provide the school kitchen with a variety of fish (predictably enough it was on a Friday, and the fish included cockles, rollmops and squid) and after our special seafood lunch, I got a teacher to whisk 60 of us off to see the movie at our local ABC.

Naturally, everyone loved the film and my shameless self-promotion of the whole day got winningly mentioned in the local paper.

As such, Spielberg is directly to blame for my head - way out of proportion to what was (and still is) actually in it - increasing in size. And last, but not least, in my cinematic rite of passage, Close Encounters of The Third Kind introduced me to girls.

Sitting at the back of the Odeon cinema in Plymouth, I stole my first kiss (it was during the scene where the sheep in Wyoming are drugged so it looks like a deadly virus has infected the countryside, thus enabling the army to evacuate the area prior to the landing of the Mothership).

She was blonde, blue-eyed, and neither of us realised we were supposed to open our mouths ...

Which is why our Steven Spielberg film festival, which kicks off next Friday at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Walton Street, Oxford, means so much to me.

Because without Mr Spielberg, I don't think I'd ever have become a man...

The Steven Spielberg season starts Friday, May 16 to Thursday May 22 (when Spielberg's latest blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull opens) at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Walton Street, Oxford. Tel: 0871 704 2062