By Appointment

Two hours of hair being washed, combed, cut, treated with reagent, covered in rollers, plugged into electrical wires, and put into a net.

A brave woman joins the fashion for permed hair, copying the likes of Claudette Colbert, or one of those other 1930s female movie stars, as seen in films on the big screen. To accompany these films, the local Horsforth cinema – Imperial Picture House (aka "T'Owd Tin Tabernacle") – puts on this ad for hairdresser Irene, giving a demonstration of a marcel ‘perm’ – with wires protruding from the head of our demonstratee, rather like a Dr Who escapee – and ending with a mud pack.

This film is part of a collection of mainly family films. All that is known of the filmmaker is that his surname was Clarke, and that he had one son, Peter, born in the 1930s, and another, Michael Andrew, born in 1943. It is the Parisian Marcel Grateau who is usually credited with revolutionising hair styling when he started using heating irons on the hair of prostitutes living on the outskirts of Montmartre in 1872 – giving rise to the famous hairstyle bearing his name. This hairstyle, along with the finger wave, became highly fashionable in the 1920s – associated with flappers and their bob hair styles – as electric waving tongs arrived, followed by the invention of lots of different variations for perming hair.