Long before the invention of digital technology and the birth of Keira Knightley, cinema shows in Britain contained not one feature, or two features, but also what the advertisements called a "full supporting programme". That meant newsreels, maybe a cartoon, or what the trade called "interest" films: travelogues and such. Many of those weren’t interesting at all, nor have they become so with age, though that’s not the case with the 12 examples drawn by the BFI National Archive from a travelogue series shot all over London’s highways and byways in 1923/1924.
The producer of the series, Harry B. Parkinson, was more entrepreneur than film artist. Even so, these London snapshots, each around 10 minutes long, offer sights so fascinating to behold that my finger kept pressing the pause button. For there’s so much here to take in: the frontage, say, of King’s Cross Station, no tidier in 1923 than it is now; the lost glass wonder of Crystal Palace, destroyed by fire in 1936; a 31 bus advertising "Iron Jelloids for Weakness"; and Erskine’s, a horribly notorious Whitcomb Street café-bar, "famous for its negro clientele" (the films’ intertitles aren’t remotely PC).
I started to curse whenever I felt the films taking a misstep
Parkinson, scriptwriter Frank Miller and the gifted unnamed cameraman (a genius at shooting through doorways) didn’t just round up the usual heritage sights.They also poked around the East End and Limehouse, and found what they saw rather shocking. Intertitles eagerly point out class differences, and are often cheerfully xenophobic, especially in Cosmopolitan London; the films’ inbuilt attitudes are as much a part of the historical evidence as the images themselves.
The DVD presentation is generally smart, John Sweeney’s piano accompaniments are adroit, and the six films that have been restored with an approximation of their original colour tinting look very lovely. Indeed, so much here is splendid that I started to curse whenever I felt the films taking a misstep: when the intertitles took up too much time or dropped aspirates in the Cockney style; when bits of quaint dramatisation were added; when the camera pootled down Old Father Thames, a snooze subject if ever there was one, or gazed at too many flowers.
But as Dr Johnson famously said, a DVD critic who’s tired of London is tired of life; and it never took too long before Wonderful London became wonderful again. Buy it and enjoy an armchair feast.
