Seeing The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s love letter to cinema, in the afternoon before watching the final episode of Happy Valley stirs thoughts on how we watch.

The Spielberg film is an autobiographical fiction woven from his early life: his anxiety, a nascent love of film, his parents’ divorce.

The screening is introduced by a short speech in which the director thanks everyone for going to see his film at a cinema full of other people. Ironically, there were only about 20 of us in the audience to hear that, but there you go.

In the scene that follows, young Sammy Fableman is taken by his parents to see The Greatest Show On Earth. A panning shot shows row upon row of cinemagoers, their faces tipped expectantly towards the screen, none more so than nervous young Sammy on his first trip to the cinema.

Then and now, and all that. But Spielberg is right: seeing a film in a cinema is just so much better. No Twitter or newspaper to distract you/me; no newspaper to pick up and shake annoyingly in quiet moments. Just a big screen to swallow your attention whole.

The Fabelmans is filled with light and shadows and has a deft touch in introducing the tyro director’s early obsession with film, and in handling the family’s difficulties. At times it almost feels as if you are watching the grandest home movie ever made.

Mark Kermode in The Observer was both warm and a touch lukewarm about the film, but it seemed better than that to this fan of still going to see films with others, to share the experience, and to absorb a film (and meet a friend for a drink afterwards in a proper pub, as is required in law).

It is his mother Mitzi who buys the younger Sammy his first camera, helping him to recreate the train crash from The Greatest Show On Earth, using his new camera and his now dented trainset.

Gabriel LaBelle is a perfect fit for the filmmaker as a teenager: small and nervous, angry and clever, sure of himself, and yet doubting too. He uses the camera to film a family camping holiday, and accidentally records signs of hidden love between Mitzi and her husband’s best friend, something that begins her unravelling, and accelerates the falling apart of the family.

Michelle Williams is brightly but oddly mannered as Mitzi, as if she is conscious of playing the role of mother, and perhaps that’s the idea: as Mitzi is pretending to be someone she isn’t.

When the family moves to California, the teenage Sammy faces antisemitism and bullying at high school. He uses his camera to win friends, and as a weapon to exact revenge on his enemies in a manner he only half understands.

The family’s name is, I guess, a play on fable, as in stories: a family tale from someone who will fill his life with many other stories.

Incidentally, the wonderful and funny denouement alone is worth the price of entry to a proper cinema.

If The Fabelmans is filled with brightness, Happy Valley is dunked in the rain and drabness of West Yorkshire, although brightness sometimes falls on Sally Wainwright’s truly great crime drama.

It fleetingly flames those moorland panoramas on the screen, and brightens the script too, as Wainwright spins humour from character and situation.

The conclusion of Happy Valley was brutal and funny, and unexpectedly tender, too.

After the guessing games, all the fan theories, we got to see how Wainwright chose to conclude her Yorkshire epic about Sergeant Catherine Cawood and her nemesis, the psychopathic criminal, Tommy Lee Royce (a terrifyingly horrible turn from the usually urbane James Norton).

Sarah Lancashire’s performance as Cawood was just such a perfect fit: you feel you are watching a rounded, bruised woman tramping through that valley in her exhaustion, trudging to the end, stubborn, valiant, and ready to call a twat a twat.

The real drama came the previous week with Tommy’s escape from court, and two story strands – that of the murdering chemist and the bullying PE teacher ­­– were tied up a little swiftly last night, almost as an after-thought.

A longer series would have been good, but all TV dramas have to end, and we’ve been lucky enough to see Happy Valley unfold over the weeks, over the years.

No binge-watching here, no televisual gluttony. The country bunched together at the same time on the Sunday sofa, crisps and all, the way it used to be. The closest television comes to seeing a new film at a proper cinema.