I had a salutory lesson in what’s important when it comes to our celebrity-sodden popular culture this week, courtesy of my children.

On Sunday night we made a family visit to Skipton for the charity premiere of the second movie based on CS Lewis’s classic children’s fantasy series, the Narnia books.

The new movie, out on Thursday for the rest of you plebs, is called Prince Caspian and, like its predecessor The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, stars young Ilkley actress Georgie Henley as one of the four Pevensie siblings transported to this magical world.

It must be 18 months or so since we were given the DVD of the first Narnia movie, and Charlie and Alice have watched the grooves off it ever since (if a DVD disc actually does have grooves). Alice, in particular, has developed a worryingly precocious (she’s only three-and-a-half) crush on William Moseley, the dashing young actor who plays the eldest of the Pevensie children, Peter.

Or rather, she hasn’t. Alice likes Peter and everything he stands for. She doesn’t care a fig for William Moseley, who for all she understands doesn’t actually exist.

Sadly for Alice, Peter wasn’t present in person on Sunday night, but Georgie Henley, who plays Lucy, was there, as the guest of honour. The children were very excited at the prospect of meeting Lucy, and we gathered in the lobby of the Plaza cinema as she arrived.

Georgie, though not even 13-years-old, was very professional and very chatty, and was more than happy to pose for a picture.

The only trouble was, Charlie and Alice had no idea who “Georgie Henley” actually was.

“Do you mind if they call you ‘Lucy’?” I whispered to her.

She didn’t, and squatted down to give Charlie and Alice a hug. “Come and stand with Lucy and have your picture taken,” she said.

The children were, as you can imagine, thrilled. But not at meeting a film star. They were thrilled at meeting a character. But they also had no reason to believe they couldn’t meet Lucy Pevensie; they’d seen her in the film often enough, why would they think she wasn’t real?

Alice, in particular, was a little perturbed by how much Lucy had grown; at first she couldn’t square this big girl with “little Lucy” from the first film. But they ended the night happy and contented in the knowledge that they’d met Lucy Pevensie.

And that, presumably, is how CS Lewis would have wanted it. While the job actors do in bringing much-loved characters to life is a very important one, we know they’ve really done it well when, like Georgie Henley, they truly become that character in the eyes of the viewer, especially when those viewers are small children with a sense of wonder that we adults should cherish and, indeed, envy.