Look Before You Leap

The bitter-sweet world of 70s dating for a single guy in search of romance.

In a desperate search for a soul mate, a single guy signs up with the Match-A-Mate Marriage Bureau and survives a series of disastrous blind dates. Sunderland is the setting for our romantic hero’s failed encounters with a cycling dynamo and a ‘tart with a heart’, superbly acted by a local deputy headmistress in a curly wig.

This fiction film was a one-off for Michael Gough, Head of Education Services for the Hearing-Impaired in Sunderland, and an award-winning amateur filmmaker and member of Newcastle & District Amateur Cinematographers Association from 1972 who preferred to make documentaries. With a game production team and cast of friends, including his wife Linda Gough as the ultimately perfect love match, Look Before You Leap won the team award in the 1974 IAC North v South competition, and was placed second in the Grand Final. Michael Gough’s newsreel documentary Welcome to Washington also won the 1978 Amateur Cine World magazine Ten Best trophy, the Oscar of the amateur film world.