Housing Problems

The format is the same as any old item on any old Newnight, and it's hard to regain mentally a state of affairs when such a film might have seemed groundbreaking. And although the social conditions described - bugs, squalor - seem like a call to arms, the fact is that the film was sponsored by a gas combine anxious to build blocks of flats which they could fill with their ovens and Ascots. The lasting interest lies in the unmediated (or so it appears) straight to camera monologues of the Stepney slum-dwellers themselves: a reminder of a time when kitchens were for toffs and everyone else just had a scullery.