Gift ideas, no.45

I am loving what the BFI has been doing, re-telling the story of twentieth century Britain through collections of occasionally familiar but mostly undiscovered documentaries.

The newest collection in the series, Shadows of Progress, has just been released, and I've spent a happy couple of days trawling through it.

The films here are much less well-known than those from the earlier period: television gradually took over from the cinema as the place where we expected to see factual programming, and the film documentaries made during this period have been neglected.

Geniuses like John Krish -- who was an assistant to the great Humphrey Jennings before the Second World War -- made extraordinary films including the wonderful The Elephant Will Never Forget, an elegy to the last week in service of the London tram.

Three of Krish's other films are also presented here, including a delightful documentary following a group of children from the Birmingham slums taken on a day trip to the seaside.

There is also colour, of a sort, with films looking at the booming New Towns (that was Harlow), and later works sponsored by oil companies and others.

So many of these stories are very moving (that was a small boy recovering from polio), although most of them feel clunky in parts, a reflection of changing social fashions and speech, and of our own experience of reality filmmaking.

Krish spoke at the National Film Theatre the other week, and summarised his philosophy of being "a part of" rather than "apart from": that humanity informs most of the documentaries in this set.

It is an extraordinary partner to the previous set, Land of Promise.

That covered the emergence of the documentarists, through the propaganda period of the Second World War and into the daylight of the immediate post-War era.

Rather morbidly, I struggle to watch those films without the knowledge that almost everyone depicted in them (other than the children) is now long-dead.

And yet, these films make them live. There is something touching and moving about getting closer to these people.

Both box sets are highly recommended -- a great way to while away the interminable Christmas holidays without having to speak to your relatives.