Food for Thought

1940-07
Sound
6m

Grumpy Grandma is put in her place during wartime food demonstration

This film collaboration between Ealing Studios and the Ministry of Food offers us a 'ringside seat' at a meeting of the 'Hillside Road Food Club', whose members are gathered around a table in a front parlour room. The leader of the group has some robust exchanges with a cantankerous 'Grandma' - well-known to audiences at the time as radio character 'Grandma Buggins' played by comedienne Mabel Constanduros (Ealing regulars Muriel George and Elliot Markham also appear).

We learn that there are four different kinds of food from which you can get all the vitamins you need to stay healthy. Individual demonstrators (including two children) show labelled items of food which fall into these four categories. The food classification seems rather muddled, but it's a good humoured attempt to educate the populace on how to stay healthy despite food rationing.

Explains the nutritional values of various foods.

Near Your Local Cinema

Local goods for local people! Screen advertising wasn’t all national brands and chain stores.

Purpose-built cinemas began appearing around Britain shortly before WWI, booming in popularity during the War and developing into the ‘picture palaces’ of the 1920s - when adverts jostled for space alongside newsreels before the main feature. Local businesses were quick to see the potential of a big screen and a captive audience to promote their wares.

While they didn’t have access to the budgets of the national brands, regionally-specific businesses had the benefit of that personal touch. Products and services evolved over time, but that scratchy ad for your local Indian restaurant, so integral to the cinema-going experience into the 1990s, had its roots in the booming entrepreneurship of the industry many decades before.