A Welcome to Britain

This 1943 film seems rather quaint today, but one should bear in mind that times have changed, and that does not mean simply that the price of beer has increased from one and thrupence a pint!

It was made to tell American soldiers how to behave and more importantly how not to behave when they rubbed shoulders with the natives. Most telling is the cameo as the narrator departs from the train in which an elderly woman shakes hands with him and a black soldier - alluded to here as "coloured", or perhaps that should be "colored". The cameo that follows, with the American general, is clearly something else.

The point of the encounter with Bob Hope was, well, if it was to explain the local currency, it didn't do a very good job. As probably most Americans don't realise, Hope was actually an Englishman, as were Stan Laurel, Cary Grant and Charlie Chaplin. The rest of the film is rather pointless; it would have been better if the people who put it together had concentrated less on contrived humour than on presenting concrete facts.