Watch out, Hugo and Camilla are about

Wendy Holden

It's no longer naff to be a home video addict. Camcorders are de rigueur in the poshest places, writes ; As I stood in the art gallery, absorbed by the vast and beautiful Bonnard, something moved beside me. Working from left to right, a young man with a camcorder was filming the painting. I leapt to the usual conclusions: another auto-focusing anorak, collecting video souvenirs. But now it seems I could have been quite wrong.

Camcorders, you see, are getting cool.

Francis Ford Coppola said recently: "The next generation of film-makers will come from the world of the camcorder." And last week Ken Russell, always at film's cutting edge, appeared on Channel 4's I Camcorder series teaching a scrap-metal dealer how to film his niece's wedding.

The stigma is fading. Camcorders are now zooming in on the best possible places. A quantum social leap was made at a society wedding recently where a close friend of the Queen was seen panning with relish. It's U, it seems, if done in the best possible taste.

So my man in the gallery, far from being a tourist preparing hours of video torture, was quite probably laying down a high-concept impressionist sequence to cut into his latest home-film project.

Although it's difficult to imagine achieving film noir gravitas through this Beadle-tainted medium, the camcorder is definitely less naff these days. And, if it's not quite out of the picnic woods yet, the evidence for its rehabilitation is impressive.

Hollywood took the camcorder on board in films like sex, lies and videotape and Natural Born Killers. Here in Britain, television has been its champion. BBC2's Video Nation series, in which people filmed themselves doing the washing-up, exploited both the intimacy of the medium and the British nosy neighbour syndrome. Channel 4's I Camcorder, devised by the writers of Red Dwarf, Doug Naylor and Rob Grant, was created to troubleshoot for those who have trouble shooting. The presenter, Robert Llewellyn, says: "If the programme encourages three people to become film-makers, we'd be very happy, but if it helps 3 million people to make less boring videos, we'd be even happier."

It is estimated that 10 per cent of the British population, roughly 6 million people, own a camcorder, with millions more having access. A drop in prices - a perfectly reasonable one can now be yours for around pounds 400 - accounts to a large extent for the boom. Yet so, ironically, does Jeremy Beadle. The years spent by the camcorder in the wilderness of naff have been the key to its rehabilitation. Videoing is much more complex than a brush and a palette, but, unlike painting, everyone thinks they can do it. And that includes posh folk. But the sensible employ an expert.

"My camcorder looks like a still camera, so I get less hassle," says upmarket video specialist Jamie Lawson-Johnston. "At weddings I always avoid cheesy music and non-stop close-ups of the bride. I film things like the flowers arriving and the champagne going in."

Mr Lawson-Johnston also reports increased interest in his camcorder services at the more exclusive ski resorts. "I take four or five people for half a day's filming out on the slopes and then add a soundtrack. I used to have to sell it quite hard, but now it's become much more acceptable."

The real video boom, however, is off-piste, down at the nursery slopes, where a cluster of paternal camcor-ders crowds round children at ski school. Filming children can, however, rebound on the parent.

"A friend was videoing my husband pulling our small son along on a sledge," says one ski-ing mother. "Our son fell out and my husband just picked him up and stuffed him back into the sledge without comforting or kissing him. So now we have it on video that he's an inadequate father."

Filming children at each and every stage of their lives is now a firmly established part of the parental curriculum even at the most exclusive schools. "It's manic, particularly at school plays," says Joanna Macpherson, whose two children attend private London day schools. "You get fathers lying doggo at the back and then leaping up when their little darlings come on to the stage. People on the whole tend to put up with it but there are a lot of sideways glances."

Camcorders are also the hi-fis of the Nineties, the gizmo-lover's dream. There is a world of battery chargers, video rewinders, zoom lenses, fish-eye lenses, fuzzy logic (yes, really), editing suites and windjammers for the aficionado. Most satisfying of all is the ever-advancing technology. "It's endless," says Philip Lattimore, editor of Video Camera magazine. "There's even a camcorder that guesses what you're looking at. It analyses where your iris is pointing and focuses in. What the future holds you can only guess."

One thing the future does hold is a visually literate generation of camcorder-users, weaned on TV, film and computers, who will be the future of film. "Camcorders," says Robert Llewellyn, "used to be bought by men over 45 to film their kids tottering around. Now those kids are getting hold of those camcorders and are making telly programmes."