This cheerful three-disc collection, presented by the BFI and culled from the archives of the Children’s Film Foundation, offers another opportunity to wallow unashamedly in a bright, breezy, mildly perilous world of youthful hi-jinks, colourful adventure and shameless adult-baiting. If ever we needed reminding that the past was a foreign country where they did things differently, the BPI’s CFF releases are the only port of call we need to make.
The beauty of Children’s Film Foundation productions lies in the fact that, filmed virtually entirely on location all over the UK (no boring stuffy soundstages here), they produce gorgeously-preserved snapshots of the times and places in which they were made. Football frenzy drama Cup Fever (1976), for example, is set in and around the backstreets of Manchester and Eccles, many of which have remained unchanged in the subsequent fifty years (we know, we’ve Google Mapped) and which features an extended guest sequence with the then Manchester United squad including legends such as George Best, Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, and Nobby Stiles. 4D Special Agents (1981) is a stolen jewels caper set around London’s now-unrecognisable Docklands and 1976’s eerie nuclear era thriller One Hour to Zero fully exploits the visual and dramatic potential of its cold, remote north Wales location. Peril for the Guy (1956) stars as a tiny Frazer (Doctor Who) Hines and is a hair-raising yarn set around post-war London involving a dastardly plot to steal a handy new oil-detection machine as well as extraordinarily lax attitudes to the use of fireworks which are flung around, waved about and stuffed into pockets with a lack of concern for potentially-deadly consequences which would turn modern health and safety types into pillars of froth.
The nine 60-ish minute films included here demonstrate how the CFF matured and changed with the times across the decades. There’s very little correlation between the agonisingly-twee Mr Horatio Nibbles (1970) and the surprisingly mature and environmentally-aware thrills of 1976’s The Battle of Billy’s Pond and 1984’s Pop Pirates (starring The Who’s Roger Daltrey), lifted from towards the very end of the CFF era, in which a teeny reggae band dabbles in the world of pop music piracy. Viewers yearning for more innocent times might find some solace in the naive but likable Anoop and the Elephant (1972) and the rather surreal Zoo Robbery (1973) in which a Yeti (‘presented’ by Eileen Helsby, who would go on to feature in the first season of the BBC’s 1970s series of Survivors and… err… EastEnder’s Dr Legg actor Leonard Fenton) is stolen from London Zoo alongside three canine-related short films included amongst the ‘special features’.
The Children’s Film Foundation is unlikely to be of any interest to today’s generation of streaming, phone-obsessed street-savvy kids but then these releases are quite determinedly not aimed at them. These are discs targeted squarely at ageing former kids who dragged themselves out of the house of Saturday mornings in their thousands in the CFF’s prime (the rise of 1970s weekend kid’s TV famously did for the CFF) looking for a shot of warm, naïve nostalgia in increasingly-alarming times. Grab yourself a hot chocolate and a fish finger sandwich, settle down and prepare to bathe in the warm glow of simpler times…
Extras: Multi-part CFF documentary / Doggie Delights
CHILDREN’S FILM FOUNDATION BUMPER BOX / CERT: PG / DIRECTED & SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: FRAZER HINES, DAVID LODGE, LINDA ROBSON, PHIL DANIELS, BERNARD CRIBBINS, DEXTER FLETCHER, ROGER DALTREY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
