Never Had It So Good: Life in the 1950s Part 2 [DVD]

An amateurish, low-budget and hopelessly inadequate look at Fifties. The title might give you the impression that this about Britain but all the newsreel material and commentary is only about London.

The visual material relies on newsreels from back then which unfortunately is not the best way to present history. They were produced weekly and shown in cinemas and at the time, before TV, this was the only way most people saw real life events as moving images. Because they were shown in an entertainment environment with feature films, trailers and ads their editorial perspective tended towards a superficial look at anything, always with a jokey commentary (and spoken by a male, usually Leslie Mitchell or Geoffrey Sumner) or if it was a sombre subject the commentary predictably followed an Establishment line.

When not covering big events of the day: Cup Final; Royalty; Election day the Pathe and Movietone newsreels seemed to search out trivial events to help fill their ten or fifteen minute slots at the local Odeon or ABC. This DVD devotes far too much time to totally unimportant light-hearted situations that the newsreels loved. Even though it just covers London there is no broad sweep of the events that shaped the city, not helped by the fact that if there is no newsreel of an event it doesn't get a mention.

It seems to me that the producers have just cobbled together a script of historical detail based on what visual material is available, written a commentary to link the clips and that's it. Incidentally, the commentary is spoken by someone who has no training in doing voice-overs.

The company has another sixty minute volume devoted to the Fifties, as well as other similar DVDs, I doubt any of them are any better than this one and considering they are just re-issues of newsreels their price seems excessive.