Film: Sleeper (1973)

Woody Allen’s Miles Monroe is a health food owner in 1973’s Greenwich Village. Cryogenically frozen, he wakes up 200 years later to discover a totally new world – one where America is a totalitarian police state, people have robotic butlers, and beautiful socialite Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) could well be the worst poet in the world.

Here Allen takes his sci-fi setting and uses it to poke merciless fun at contemporary society’s self-obsession, mixing in a healthy does of slapstick, sight gags and ludicrously large vegetables. He also takes the time to have fun with sci-fi classics from the Orwellian and Wellsian stable (it’s a pretty impressive stable) as well as pseudo-revolutionary fervour.

You might expect us to love the giant banana skin routine and Woody in a massive inflatable suit (and we do, we really do), but above all else there's the “informations from the past” scene that beats them all. Watching ABC’s Wide World Of Sports now, just for a few seconds, still feels like punishment. Yeesh.