Content area
Full text
The year is 1967. The place is your local ABC cinema. The event - the ABC Minors Children's Matinee, to which thousands of grateful parents have dispatched their offspring. First off is the ABC Minors song, the lyrics of which flash up on screen:
"We are the boys and girls all known as
Minors of the ABC
And every Saturday all line up
To see the films we like and shout
aloud with glee
We like to laugh and have our sing-song
Such a happy crowd are we
We're all pals together
We're Minors of the ABC."
After this rousing number, the cinema's manager hosts some obligatory birthday singing and talent shows. Finally comes the moment the budding juvenile delinquents are all waiting for: Calamity the Cow, shot in glorious black and white, and brought to you by those jolly nice people at the Children's Film Foundation.
The star of this epic was a 16-year-old, pre-cockney Phil Collins, one of the many future young stars nurtured by the CFF. Other notable graduates of the CFF included Michael Crawford, Dennis Waterman, Susan George, Gary Kemp, Keith Chegwin and even Matthew "The Wright Stuff" Wright. Sadly, despite such luminaries - and the fact that the BBC was screening CFF as recently as the 1980s - far too many of the CFF's works are no more than vague memories for middle-aged filmgoers, of well-spoken urchins discovering buried treasure on the Isle of Wight. However, the CFF, with its encouragement of young talent and regular cinemagoing among children, deserves to be remembered as an integral part of postwar British cinema, alongside Hammer horror or Carry On.
Children's matinees had been shown in British cinemas since the 1920s, but after the second world war, educationalists raised objections to the nature of the films being screened, leading to the Wheare report into juvenile cinemagoing in 1950. One result was the creation of the X certificate; another was the establishment in 1951 of the Children's Film Foundation, which was funded by the so-called "Eady levy", a voluntary tax taken from all cinema ticket prices.
The CFF had a total annual production budget of pounds 60,000 - an incredibly low figure, even allowing for the fact that most CFF films lasted for less...