Not all film-making achievements can be measured in Baftas, Oscars and other baubles. David Whetstone finds out about Engage Media

In Engage, Chris has an able sidekick in Charly Conquest, who joined the enterprise in rather unusual circumstances a couple of years ago.

“She rang up for work experience and we had to say, ‘Well, we haven’t got any money, but you can come for two weeks’,” recalls Chris. “We managed to get her bed and breakfast, but she did so much in that two weeks that I said, ‘If we ever manage to get the funding, will you come back?’ Shortly after that, we did and she came straight back up here.”

Like Chris, Charly, from Cambridgeshire, had a false start in life which didn’t do her any harm and may actually have done some good.

“One of the reasons I work well with kids is that I dropped out of education when I was 14 and went to work for a mechanic,” she explains. “Eventually I decided to get back into education and I went and did an English degree in Nottingham.

“But at the same time I was working as a support worker for people with learning difficulties.”

It was in this capacity that she first learned about Superkrush offshoot Engage and picked up the phone.

In the Superkrush/Engage offices I watch a powerful short film about foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. You might not have heard of it, but the term describes a range of disabilities suffered by the offspring of women who drank while pregnant.

Filmed in the North West, the story is narrated by a teenager who brings a lump to the throat with his eloquence and understanding of a condition which has left him mentally impaired. The film is a pilot, but it exposes something we should all know more about.

“More children are born with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder than with Aids or Down’s syndrome and it’s completely avoidable,” says Chris.

Bringing such things to light must surely be worth a thousand red carpets.