Jeremy Cooper, author of Brian [Amy Howden-Chapman]

HE’S a single bloke in his late 30s who works as a clerk for Camden Council, has a tiny flat on Kentish Town Road above an Indian restaurant, and spends every spare moment watching films.

Enter, nervously stage left, is Brian, whose extraordinary story is told in a book of the same name by author Jeremy Cooper.

Brian admits to difficulties in his working life, including what to say to people he’s meeting for the first time. He’s so self-deprecating that whenever he is invited to go anywhere he usually reminds himself that nobody minded much whether he turned up or not.

Jeremy has never lived in Camden but he’s said to think that the area provided a familiar, stable urban environment that allows Brian to blend into the background, supporting his need for self-preservation and emotional safety.

Dark feelings can begin to envelop Brian at night when home alone, he may stop bothering to make himself hot food and too often is unable to remember a single thing from the hours of television he sat slumped in front of. In this mood he may also stop reading, which is far more serious.

Brian is “endlessly anxious” often about the same repeated, insignificant and ridiculous things. For example, when about to board a bus, he returns, panicking, to his flat to check the window of his bedroom is closed.

At least his difficulties are noticed by his good friend Lorenzo who runs a local café and tells him: “Give yourself a break, Brian. You’re a decent bloke. Treat yourself better.”

One way of coping is taking up singing. He joins the Camden Council Choral Society who perform at the nearby Roundhouse. He is a tenor, his perceptive ear compensating for an inability to read music.

But it is films mostly shown to enthusiasts at the British Film Institute on the South Bank that are his real saviour.

He likes 1988’s award-winning Distant Voices, Still Lives based on director Terence Davies’ boyhood and starring the late Pete Postlethwaite. It is a film about a working-class family who are not always happy, and Brian detects elements of his own life in it.

Brian also becomes a fan of Japanese film and describes himself as a “bit of a Buddhist”. Then there is Burning Angel, made in Finland, recounting a true-life incident about the suicide of a psychiatric nurse. Her vulnerability touches Brian’s own, forcing him to “push down inside against the swell of locked memories”.

Brian works in the council’s rates section responsible for keeping up to date the lease and freehold records. It is a task he fulfils with the efficiency of an experienced bookkeeper, but in the office Brian does his best not to be noticed.

Brian’s BFI visits soon multiply from once a fortnight to once a week, to twice a week and once each weekend. As Jeremy writes: “He (Brian) needed release somehow from the pressure in his head. Film, he reckoned, might be the answer. The thing about the cinema, in Brian’s experience, seated in a large dark space staring without interruption at a high wide screen, entranced, lost in another’s vision, was that he found feelings inside himself he did not know existed, replaced the next night by a different film and new sensations. And the next. Another film, another set of feelings. None of it was about him, it was all about the movie.
He watches actor Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs and is shocked by the manipulation and deceit of the Hopkins character, serial killer and cannibal, Dr Hannibal Lecter.

Not only does he enjoy the films but he also manages to make friends among the regular film buffs.

He enjoys successive brief fantasies, after seeing each film: After Midnight Cowboy he becomes a shoeshiner, after Babette’s Feast a cook, after One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest he becomes a strong silent Cherokee. He imagines himself as Juliette Brioche’s aunt after Three Colors: Blue, as a New York gangster after Mean Streets, as a dying invalid after Daddy Nostalgie, and after The Herd he sees himself as a shepherd.

Former Londoner Cooper, 77, now lives in Somerset. An art historian who served as a guest expert on  Antiques Roadshow between 1979 and 1981, he’s the author of seven novels, three of them published since 2019. According to the Guardian he has no mobile phone and hasn’t watched television for 25 years.

Brian was published last year but has already amassed a wide following. Endeavour actor Shaun Evans described it in the Times last month as a “terrific story about friendship and community and how art gives meaning to our lives.”

The actor Toby Jones has called it (in the Guardian) “the most extraordinary novel… the person who sent it to me did say: ‘You’d be great to play this part’”.

• Brian. By Jeremy Cooper, Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12