But there were advantages: the competition, the equipment, the contacts. "I'd rather do that than work in a video store," he admits when Tarantino crops up in our conversation.Ironically, it was this spell in the States that convinced him he wanted to make films in Britain. "You're abroad and talking to people about your home and you start playing it up a bit. First you're exaggerating, then you're embellishing, then you're narrating and inventing. "A fake dog," he adds.After Troma, he won a scholarship to Columbia, where he spent three years making terrible films. However, it wasn't just any old Troma production- line garbage - it was the gore classic by which the company is known. The Toxic Avenger, no less."Yes, the toxic element was prescient, don't you think? I ended up doing the special-effects guy's job, experimenting with explosives.

I remember we had to blow up a dog." He leans forward, concerned. Films like The Conversation were self-reflexive, sure, but they were about life, too And they were radical, clued-up films. Showing at your local!"Despite such proclamations, you shouldn't take him for a snob. If he were, he wouldn't have lasted a minute in the company of Troma Films, the notorious trash-movie merchants with whom Ross landed a spot of work experience while he was at university.His aunt was selling movie advertising to the trade papers and, conversing daily with independent film companies, she stuck her foot in the Troma door on her nephew's behalf. "I fell out of love with cinema quite a long time ago," he admits glumly "By the early 1980s, my tastes were pretty well formed I think we've become too post-modern Cinema needs to be shifted back to life and ideas. It's important that people should take a journey they'd rather not take, and leave with a firecracker up their arse."Ross hasn't left a cinema with his bottom aflame in this manner for a considerable time.

So often you come out of the cinema feeling soothed, patronised, morphined up to the eyeballs or given a jerk-off. The story begins in 1961, but Ross himself didn't chance upon Graham Young until 1972."I was eight," he recalls. "My mother and I were fascinated by the story - he had lived locally in Neasden, the North Circular road, so it was my landscape really."It wasn't until he found himself homesick in New York at the end of the 1980s, having graduated from the prestigious Columbia Film School, that he exhumed his morbid fascination and set to work constructing a screenplay. The plan was to finish it, then take it to a producer in England. Coincidentally, that producer had discovered that Jeff Rawles, an actor best known as George in Drop the Dead Donkey, was researching the Graham Young case and also planning to write a film about it Ross and Rawles decided to pool their talents. Their agenda was clear."Our first decision was not to do an Equus and make the psychiatrist the focal point.

We wanted to have madness, or what people call madness, as the centre of the piece, so that there was no moral barometer for you The movie twists you, and I think people need to be twisted. The Young Poisoner's Handbook gives us north London teenager Graham Young (played by Hugh O'Conor), following him from his dabblings with a chemistry set at the age of 14, through his conviction for murder and imprisonment in a mental hospital, to his tentative release back into society. Several things about spin doctors alarm Labour's rank and file. Where your traditional party member might talk about class politics, Gould and his ilk deal in the adman's jargon of Unique Selling Propositions. Where traditional members believe that policies should reflect the labour movement's values, the spin doctors believe that they must respond to opinion poll ratings.