Truly, Madly, Cheaply

I went into this programme (shown on BBC Four last weekend) - about the bygone days of some truly STRANGE British films - with some nostalgia, but also a certain amount of trepidation, mainly because of the slightly patronising title. The suggestion seems to be the only films Britain could make were on minuscule budgets and even thinner plots, and grossly inferior to the glossier American product.

There is no mention at all of British Cinema's golden period - the 1940s - when we produced The Third Man, Brief Encounter, Fallen Idol, A Matter of Life and Death, The Thief of Bagdad, Odd Man Out, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and so many others (the name Humphrey Jennings ever so briefly creeps in.) I know it's about B-Movies, but some little reference would have helped, to put things in context.

Some of the fare on offer in Matthew Sweet's dissertation are films that would've been best forgotten, whereas other oddities such as Konga (with its climax on Croydon High Street standing in for Westminster) have to be seen to be believed! I confess I've sat through some of these films in my time - films like Beast in the Cellar, Deathline, Fire Maidens from Outer Space (yes - a British film), House of Whipcord, The Man Who Haunted Himself, Night Caller, and indeed, all the Carry On films, were all fairly cheap but cheerful, and with some respectable acting to keep them above water, usually of a much better standard than in American B-Movies.

Sweet's notion seems to be that the second features tell a truer picture of Britain than their more illustrious mainstream counterparts. One such example he refers to is Psychomania - but then, looking back to my old review, I've just realised, there was another film about that era of youthful thuggery: it was called A Clockwork Orange. Too often his assertion seems to be that Britain could only make very cheap B-movies about itself, when there are dozens of shining examples that are not mentioned at all. As an exercise in looking at an alternative British cinema it's all well and good, but then hang on a minute, I hear the name Hammer being mentioned later on - with stuff like The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies - yet no mention of their shining horror classics The Curse of Frankenstein or Dracula, or even such dark, sombre social dramas as The Damned. And The Wicker Man was hardly a B-Movie, just treated that way by its studio, British Lion, who hated it so much.

He also neglects to mention that, thanks to Lottery money, there have been some obscure B-Movie type British films rushed into production in recent years, such as the hideous Sex Lives of the Potato Men; only nowadays, it's next to impossible to get these films shown on British screens at all.

For better or worse.

Oh yes, and I spent much of the programme wondering where that lovely cinema was that he was sitting in, with a 1950s street outside. According to the credits, it's in the Glasgow Transport Museum.