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David Gritten in the Telegraph is at his most succinct when he says:

"There's a case for a body offering public subsidies to innovative, important but not obviously commercial British films....That was the Arts Council's role until 2000. But the Film Council wants to recoup its money - it wants hits.

It's a losers' game. Hollywood studios can afford to play it, because the magnitude of their hits covers the losses of their flops. But Britain isn't Hollywood, and the Film Council, taking a punt with other people's money, can never hope to win. There's no need for a quango that spends public funds on commercially minded but unsuccessful British films. Such films sink at the box-office without Film Council help - often, indeed, after the Film Council declines to back them and they are financed from elsewhere.

Veteran screenwriter William Goldman, musing on the impossibility of predicting film hits, once wrote: "Nobody knows anything." Now there's a realistic mission statement the Film Council's senior executives might consider. The rest of us might wonder why these people are allowed to waste our taxes on such fruitless, ill-judged ventures."

Go figure.....