Yes, over the last few nights I've watched my way through Lawrence of Arabia on DVD.

This was one of three DVDs I hired from Blockbuster - £5 for three, for a week. On the whole, this arrangement is not quite the bargain it may seem. The idea is that, as ancient DVDs accumulate on their shelves, and as most of the people who really, really want to see them have seen them, they hire out their back catalogue for longer, and for less. The competition from the Mom and Pop Everything Including Videos And DVDs shops has also stirred Blockhuster into action.

Trouble is, for the time being anyway, they've overdone the price cut.

Basically, this is such a "good deal" that there aren't any rentable copies of the majority of the DVDs the pretty covers of which are on display. This means that it takes a long time to find three that appeal. And when you do, what with there only being one copy of each movie they are liable to be in a seriously scratched state, such that they not infrequently won't play properly all the way through, which is extremely irritating. My advice to Blockbuster would be: get this system working properly by having a decent number of copies of each title, and in decent condition, and don't waste your money on national TV advertising until the product is worth bragging about. Hard selling a duff product is a textbook way to build bad word of mouth. The idea is excellent. The execution, at any rate its manifestation in my branch (the Warwick Way branch) of Blockbuster, is not good.

This deal has, though, caused me to rent weird little foreign movies (to make up the three) which I wouldn't otherwise have given a second thought to, which hasn't been all bad news. There are usually a few of those available.

And it also caused me to take another look at Lawrence. What a movie! I had no idea. I thought I had seen it, but I never take in what is happening in a movie the first two goes. Plus I was obviously far too young to grasp even approximately what was happening the first time around. It is humiliating how much I learned about Lawrence – who he was, what he was, what he did, when he did it, where he did it, etc. etc.

I realise that liberties were taken with the mere facts. Real Lawrence was a midget, O'Toole Lawrence was a giant. The American journalist was called something quite different. Only the facts were changed. But the rough outlines of the story are presumably approximately as told in the movie, and I didn't really know these at all, I now realise. I spent quite a bit of time poring over an Atlas, and was very grateful for the extra information on DVD number 2 which explained the routes of Lawrence's various journeyings.

One particular thing I didn't know about this movie until now was that Robert Bolt (he of A Man For All Seasons) did the script for it. It showed. That man had a real knack of summarising great gobs of history in one line of dialogue. I think Bolt's contribution helps to account for what was, for me, the most interesting aspect of all of this movie, which was the way it so continuously held my interest. More and more these days, I find my mind wandering during movies. Lawrence held my interest throughout, and I clockwatched during it only to register how long it had been going on without me clockwatching, if you get my meaning. I always knew that it looked great, with all those mountains and mirages and Arabs cavalry charging with big flags. What I hadn't realised was how engagingly the actual story was told. All the feuding between different brands of Arabs had been pretty much lost on me the first time round, as had the scenes in Damascus towards the end, when Lawrence's Arabs storm into Damascus but then get bored with politics, city life, etc. and bugger off back to the desert.

But the pictures obviously helped, a lot, in fact I've since read that David Lean had to be sure that the pictures would work before he started seriously to make the movie. Freddie Young, I think they said, was the Director of Photography, and he was a Big Cheese, yes? I remembered some of the great visual effects (blowing out the match and cutting to the desert, Omar Sharif riding out of the mirage) probably because these get rehashed endlessly on the television whenever Lawrence is talked about. But there were many more visual glories that I had quite forgotten about. That every frame was concocted with the care of an oil painter is obviously a huge part of why I constantly wanted to see what happened next.

All that, plus another couple of really pretty good movies, called Slap Her She's French and Dirty Pretty Things which, the latter especially, were also above average in my opinion, for a fiver. And not a scratch on any of them, enough to matter. This time, I got my Blockbuster special offer money's worth. And they don't have to be back until tomorrow.