The Story of British Pathe

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[edit] General Information

History Documentary hosted by Verity Sharp, published by BBC in 2011 - English narration

[edit] Cover

[edit] Information

Series delving into film and newsreel company British Pathe's archive. For more than half a century, the film and newsreel company British Pathe documented almost every aspect of life - the remarkable and the run-of-the mill, the extraordinary and the everyday.

[edit] The Birth of the News

Covering everything from major world events and exotic foreign travelogues to the pageantry of state occasions and gritty social issues, the company amassed a unique documentary record of 20th-century life. This series delves into British Pathe's amazing treasure trove of images, beginning with the work of the buccaneering cameramen behind Pathe's newsreels - men who witnessed pivotal moments in history and created many of the conventions of news programming that we still use today.

[edit] The Voice of Pathe

The company's output really came into its own during the Second World War, when the distinctively clipped and relentlessly chipper commentaries by its announcer Bob Danvers-Walker provided stirring encouragement during the Blitz - and offered authoritative advice on how housewives struggling to feed their families on the ration could overcome privation and to 'make do and mend'. As this programme reveals, for generations of cinemagoers it was the voice of British Pathé that expressed the values and the spirit of Britain.

[edit] Entertaining Britain

While the company was famous for its pioneering news reports, it also produced immensely popular 'cinemagazines', which entertained cinemagoers for decades. Initially made to boost the nation's morale after the First World War, entertaining strands such as Pathe Pictorial and Eve's Film Review were designed to appeal to women who were interested in fashion, celebrities and movie stars - and offered plenty of handy hints for those running the home. In the 1930s, the arrival of synchronised sound increased the popularity of cinemagazines, and the company launched Pathetone Weekly - a strand that featured what Pathe believed were the 'novel, amusing and strange' dimensions of our national life.

[edit] Around the World

In the age before mass tourism made international travel affordable and accessible to most of us, their sumptuous travelogues and anthropological documentaries offered British cinemagoers a rare opportunity to glimpse faraway worlds. For decades Pathe dutifully covered royal tours to every corner of the British Empire, but by the 1950s, when the first package holidays were sold, the company also recorded the experiences of the first generations of Britons who were able to indulge in leisure travel around the globe.