Safety Cabinet

Pills, snakes and Sybil Thorndyke: another super-varied edition of the fascinating London Line series.

This edition of cine-magazine London Line exemplifies the sheer variety of topics that this always intriguing series encompassed. First up, an item about the importance of safely storing household medicines to stop children getting access to them: shot in the London Line studio with a group of kids present, it’s as lively and charming as it is informative. Next we step into natural history, with a filmed report on research into venomous snakes in Nairobi. Finally, legendary thespian Dame Sybil Thorndyke is interviewed, then gives a bespoke soliloquy to camera.

London Line was commissioned by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office through the government’s Central Office of Information. A sustained exercise in using film for British ‘soft power’, the series combined studio with location items presenting a positive, deliberately contemporary view of Britain’s culture, science and changing global role. These films were distributed to overseas audiences, both on TV and via mobile projectors, with different versions produced for different territories. Those aimed at African audiences, many in countries only recently freed from British colonial rule (this edition seems to be intended specifically for Kenya), had Black presenters. Indeed, London Line arguably made more regular use of Black onscreen talent than any other British media production of the day – though it was never seen in Britain. In this case, though, the Thorndyke item has been borrowed from a different version of the series, aimed at North American and Australasian audiences and fronted by white presenter Michael Smee.