The BBC is going to the pictures this summer to celebrate homegrown cinema.

A series about British movies and an Arena special will be backed by the screening of 40 or more films in coming months.

Perhaps those who worry about the state of the British film industry will take heart from recalling past triumphs, from Gandhi to Four Weddings And A Funeral, from Brief Encounter to Bend It Like Beckham.

At the centre of BBC2's The Summer Of British Film is British Film Forever, a seven-part documentary series looking at a different genre each week.

Executive producer Ricky Kelehar says they didn't want to make a chronological series or another list show. "We could have done The 100 Greatest British Films or The 20 Top British Comedies, but decided that's well-worn and we'd leave that to other channels," he points out.

So they opted for genres such as thrillers, horror and fantasy, social realism and comedy. The big problem, he says, was deciding what to leave out as there was so much material.

The makers have been working on the series for a year to maximise their chances of getting the big movie names as "talking heads". They seem to have done well with Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Attenborough, Kate Winslett, Ewan McGregor and Ken Russell among those appearing. At the last count, they'd done 230 interviews.

One key issue was deciding what constitutes a British film. With talent and finance involved from all over the world, defining Britishness took some doing.

"So there are four aspects to a British film - ideally, it has a British director, the cast would be British, the setting is Britain and it's about a sense of Britishness," says Kelehar.

"Clearly, a British film doesn't need to have all of those. One of the most obvious is a film not having a British director, like Ang Lee and Sense And Sensibility. But no one would say that's not a British film.

The target audience is not the experts but the general viewer. "I'd hope there would be something in all of these programmes that people haven't heard before," he says.

The nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love was certainly something the public hadn't seen on screen before and, in the series, director Ken Russell recalls the effect it had on two cinemagoers. "I had a friend who was in a Devon village, and there was this fleapit and, much to his surprise, it was showing Women In Love," explains Russell.

"The cinema was empty apart from two old ladies sitting in front of him. They were silent, not a word, and then it ended and one turned to the other and said 'lovely carpet'."

As part of the season, BBC2 is screening around 70 British films, from the premiere of the Steve Coogan comedy, A Cock And Bull Story to old favourites such as Billy Elliot, The 39 Steps and Whistle Down The Wind.

The movie madness also includes a re-run tonight (BBC2, 7.30pm) of The Culture Show Special looking at movie locations across Britain.

Arena contributes an examination of the largely forgotten, edgy side of British cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, recalling the dark melodramas, crime films and horror shockers of those years, almost all of which were derided by contemporary critics.

Among them are the mystical wartime story A Canterbury Tale, noir classic They Made Me A Fugitive, and the bizarre melodrama Madonna Of The Seven Moons.

The public can celebrate British cinema by creating versions of classic films and submitting them through the BBC Mini Movies group at www.youtube.com/group/bbcminimovies. Favourites will be showcased on the BBC's website at bbc.co.uk/britishfilm

The season also brings back old movies with the release of seven British greats on screens in the UK Film Council funded Digital Screen Network. Middlesbrough Cineworld, Teesside Showcase, Hartlepool Vue, Newcastle Tyneside Cinema, York City Screen and Boldon Cineworld are among 136 screens taking part.

The season opens with the James Bond classic, Goldfinger on July 31. That's followed by David Lean's Brief Encounter (August 7), Billy Liar (August 14), Laurence Olivier's Henry V (August 21), The Wicker Man (August 28), The Dam Busters (September 4) and Withnail & I (September 11).

* The Summer Of British Film season begins on BBC2 on July 28.