"It is my religion which is being filmed," he wrote to me, "and I will be held responsible for views expressed."

One worry was how to treat potentially controversial scenes at the suburban but Romish shrine at Walsingham, with its candles, images and processions. After much agonising, he found a solution in a series of rhetorical questions: "I wonder if you'd call it superstitious . . . Or do you think that forces are around, strong, frightening, loving, and just out of reach, but waiting, waiting somewhere to be asked?"

When it was all completed, John wrote to Ted Roberts:

I need not have worried about the film at all. You and Eddie have made it marvellous and deep and rich and sad and funny and local. It will not get good notices. The Church of England never does. But it is the Church of England and it ambles along like the fat old commentator who signs himself, Yours ever, John Betjeman.

The last film we made together was The Queen's Realm: A Prospect of England. It was commissioned by Brigstocke, he of Bird's-Eye View, who wanted another helicopter film to mark the Silver Jubilee of the Queen in 1977. By this time we had all come to agree with John that we didn't want to fly any more in that infernal machine. We decided on a cut-and-paste job, re-editing aerial material previously filmed for Bird's-Eye View and other documentaries, all to be linked by English poetry and English music. An anthology, in fact, partially selected and wholly presided over by John.

He himself came up with some unregarded (to use a good Betjeman word) but wonderfully apt suggestions — an ode by Hilaire Belloc in praise of electricity, an elegy by Kipling about motoring, a pastoral by John Meade Falkner. His storehouse of memory again proved unique. And he advised, in the cutting-room, on whether the team's other ideas were right or not. The usual principle was that first-rate poetry with its own powerful imagery did not go well with strong visuals — they clashed, rather than enhancing each other. And he had no hesitation in being ruthless with texts, chopping off the last couplet of a Shakespeare sonnet because it didn't work with the pictures. Even the Times Literary Supplement cheered at the result.

So we ended our partnership on a high note. There were thoughts about more films, lunches to discuss them, now usually in Chelsea, at Radnor Walk, or Dog Mess Walk as he called it.