Britain on Film with Tony Robinson, PBS America: this scattershot history paints a limited picture
Britain on Film with Tony Robinson is broadcasting to a US audience on PBS and promises to reveal life in “the decades of the Second World War, the Thirties, the Fifties and ending with the roaring Sixties”. If that sentence strikes you as being all over the place, well, the show is too.
The series is built on home movie footage. But these were amateur film-makers with ambitions beyond simply capturing Aunty Mabel in the garden. They expended time and effort editing scenes together into mini-documentaries. The results are a fascinating but random collection.
The 1930s episode included a Wiltshire schoolboy’s film about his family’s butchery business that included a pig being slaughtered. The film-maker had helpfully included a caption moments beforehand – “Nervous viewer please close your eyes now, you are warned!” – but it was still quite a shock to see.
Much jollier was film of a summer camping holiday in Cornwall, young men alighting from the train smartly dressed in suits and ties. Lewis Rosenberg, who shot the film, hailed from the East End’s Jewish community, and he and his friends were some of the earliest adopters of surfing in this country. The film was shot in 1930, with war a long way off, and they appeared wonderfully carefree. Remarkably, Rosenberg’s film included a surfer’s eye view, because he had rigged the camera to the board in a waterproof casing.
Such examples of ingenuity were one of the surprising elements of the film. It didn’t present a particularly coherent picture of what Britain was like in the 1930s, because the material was too scattergun: here a surgeon filmed pinning a fractured hip; there, women working on a flower farm, and fishermen in St Ives. It was instructive, though, to see how attitudes have changed. Those women were apparently delighted to be paid on a piecework basis, then “to be back home in time to get the kids’ tea and be there when the old man came home.” A window into a different world.
