Vote for Huggett

Somewhere in Politics

Bless ’em All

Melody in the Dark

The Huggetts Abroad

It’s a Wonderful Day

Murder at the Windmill

Maytime in Mayfair

Old Mother Riley’s New Venture

Trottie True

What a Carry On!

Skimpy in the Navy

High Jinks in Society

February

Vote for Huggett was the second of Gainsborough’s adventures for what was one of Britain’s best-known families. The new episode reassembled much of the original creative team responsible for the previous year’s Here Come the Huggetts, producer Betty E. Box, director Ken Annakin, and sure-handed writers in Mabel and Denis Constanduros in collaboration with Allan Mackinnon. The opportunity for a mild satire on local politics was skilfully exploited. Four years after the end of a devastating war, regeneration of housing for the working and middle classes was of prime importance in council chambers debating town planning. Now, it hurtled dependable, decent, honest-as-the-day Joe Huggett (Jack Warner) into the maelstrom of warring municipals with its tin-pot politicians. Ethel Huggett (Kathleen Harrison) is terrified by the prospect of becoming a public figure, goaded by the appalling wife of a local official, Mrs Hall, played up to the hilt by Adrianne Allen. Amy Veness’s Grandma Huggett is usually somewhere about, ready to douse enjoyment, and there are three delightfully dotty old ladies to add to the general merriment.

Petula Clark entertains at a fete with Egbert Van Alstyne and Harry Williams’s luscious ‘In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree’, telling her audience that ‘I think the old songs are sometimes the best’. Gainsborough’s final outing for the Huggetts, The Huggetts Abroad, followed.

Mancunian’s Somewhere in Politics (its working title was That’s My Man) demands a place in any account of British musical films, but its originally released print (a generous 108 minutes) is believed lost, the only remaining fragment of eighteen minutes having no musical content. It is unfortunate. The full version included Josef Locke at his most vigorous (and seemingly fresh after long hours of drinking and carousing with his co-star Frank Randle) performing Dermot Macmurrough and Josephine V. Rowe’s evergreen ballad ‘Macushla’, John Stevenson’s setting of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, and Othmar Klose and Rudi Lukesch’s ‘Hear My Song, Violetta’, with its English lyric by Harry S. Pepper.