Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Sarah Erulkar
The film explores the design process of postage stamps and the work of three notable designers, Arnold Machin, Jeffery Matthews and David Gentleman.
Never Go With Strangers was intended for children aged between seven and ten and its purpose was ‘to warn them of the dangers of accepting lifts or presents from strangers’. Due to potential distress government officials instructed that the film only be shown under ‘responsible adult supervision’, thus denying it a TV airing for many years.
Birthright, which presents the work of the Family Planning Association, is a valuable record of the organisation of contraception and fertility services before the introduction of the contraceptive pill. But, more than this, in its filmmaking style it conveys much about the social attitudes of this era, and the spirit in which those services were conceived and delivered.
A pleasure cruiser is abandoned by all aboard and Ian, Janet and Harry, children of a trawler skipper go out in their launch to claim her. They are marooned on the cruiser by accident and saved by a rival trawler skipper.
Sarah Erulkar revisits the world of stamp collecting, in this short narrated by Tom Baker.
An indefatigable district nurse crisscrosses her rural patch to tend to the sick at home and on the farm
Hacking coughs punctuate the soundtrack throughout, making the film’s propaganda purpose clear from the start. We follow a group of children trying to find out why the various adults in their lives smoke, and what the attractions are considering what to them are obvious drawbacks. Indiscriminate smoking “looks funny to us now”, says the narrator, but The Smoking Machine’s own footage of people casually smoking in cinemas, cafés and on public transport must seem equally bizarre to today’s kids.
A documentary tracing the development of the helicopter from the original Da Vinci drawings to the modern versions actually in service in 1951.
A BAFTA award winning documentary looking at Calcutta, the most crowded and overburdened city on Earth.
