IT is easy to see why the producer and director Tommy Gormley is so angry. Three years ago, he was talking publicly about the poor state of the facilities in Scotland for film and television companies and said a major studio needed to be built quickly. “Our industry has without question suffered from the lack of one,” he said.

And yet here we are, three years on, with still no sign of progress. There are ideas on the table, and lots of talk, but in an open letter to Holyrood’s Economy, Energy and Tourism committee, Mr Gormley accuses Scottish Enterprise and Creative Scotland of lacking the true ambition to deliver the studio.

In response, the Scottish Government says it, Scottish Enterprise and Creative Scotland are determined to do everything they can to bring the studio about. But they must be judged by their record and it is woeful.

In 2014, for example, Scotland missed out on the chance for a film and TV studio backed by Pinewood (in the end, it went to Wales). The story is much the same in Northern Ireland where Game of Thrones is made. There have also been seemingly endless talks about building a studio in Cumbernauld which have still come to nothing.

Mr Gormley, who worked on the recent Star Wars movie, is justifiably frustrated by all of his, but what particularly bothers him is the idea that Scotland’s film industry can flourish without a studio - in his letter, Mr Gormley refers to a comment by Natalie Usher of Creative Scotland that the lack of a new studio was not a barrier to growing the film and TV business.

There is no doubt that major productions are still coming to Scotland (with landscapes made to be movie backdrops, that is inevitable) but if our film industry is to genuinely challenge those in the rest of the UK – indeed the rest of the world – then Scotland must have a new modern, large film studio. In the words of Mr Gormley: it is now woefully overdue, but it is not too late.