A record of how working-class people spend their leisure time in the north of England and Wales, singing in choirs, acting, visiting an amusement park, playing “Rule Britannia” in a kazoo band on a grey and miserable day. This is the first film where Jennings is clearly beginning to be Jennings. The kazoo band sequence stirred fierce criticism from some colleagues, who thought it demonstrated Jennings’ “cold disgust” at ordinary people’s amusements. But there is no disgust: merely the unflinching eye of a member of Britain’s new Mass-Observation movement (dedicated to documenting ordinary lives), and the instincts of a Surrealist who knew a bizarre sight when he saw one.

Geoff Brown