THIS month's WI debate sounded, superficially at least, pretty uncontroversial. But that was before it became immersed in matters philosophical to throw up some pretty telling points about the generation gap.

The debate sprang from a recent Channel 4 TV poll to find the alleged 100 best films of all time, which seemed safe enough. But the result of that particular programme - in fact two programmes because it ran for six hours over two nights - had incensed many of the Beggarsdale ladies and divided them into at least three different camps split, mainly, by age.

The results of the telly poll named as the best ever film Star Wars, a sort of big screen video game with little plot, no acting of note but lots and lots of special effects. Big bangs but no bite, as Cousin Kate described it.

Now Kate is of a certain age and she thought that Brief Encounter, a love story without sex filmed during the war at Carnforth, a couple of dozen miles up the road, should have been Number One. Whereas Teacher Tess, some 30 years younger, thought it should have been Shakespeare in Love, a modern offering with cultural overtones which was in fact a pretty good comedy.

Unusually, after the debate on the motion that Modern Films are Rubbish, which was carried almost unanimously, the discussion was thrown open to the floor and there was a general condemnation of television's top 10.

Number two, according to the telly, was The Godfather, which glorifies Mafia violence. Number three was the Shawshank Redemption, with some pretty nasty scenes of homosexual rape in an American prison. Number four was Pulp Fiction, in which two contract gunmen exchange quips as they murder their victims for cash. And so on.

The house voted that none of these would be in their top 100, never mind top 10. And there was almost unanimous fury that Casablanca, to many the best film of all time, came in at a mere 16 and the classic musical, Singing in the Rain, only made 24.

And that's when the arguments really started. For, it seems, the younger generation like films when lots of people either a) leap into bed or b) die in buckets of gore and no-one bothers with that quaint old notion of "a story."

It was Owd Tom who put forward Shane, one of the best westerns ever made, in which, he calculated, only four people died (three of them baddies in the last but one scene) and the hero never even kissed the leading lady, never mind dragging her between the sheets.

This, he said, was a story about the triumph of good over evil. Now this raises the philosophical bit: we wrinklies, who in the old pre-television days queued for hours at the Mar'ton Roxy every Friday night just to get a seat, expected the good guys to win. This represented a thing called "morality."

Today, it's the Mafia hitmen or psychopaths like Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs (about mass murder and cannibalism) who are the heroes. Good guys (ie, those who obey the law and don't jump into bed thrice a night) are mere wimps.

These are the films that our youngsters look upon as light entertainment.

Is it any wonder that Mar'ton of a weekend evening is like Dodge City - without Wyatt Earpe as marshal?

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.