Margaret Thomson

Is your hedge thin and straggly? Don't worry, help is at hand.

A science-fiction film about children who manage to split the atom and thereby create a new form of popcorn.

This eye-opening drama-doc, set in a psychiatric hospital, was used to train student nurses and tells us much about evolving attitudes to mental illness. A progressive training tool in its time, it still feels sincere but also sensible and silly in about equal measure. The clinical need to clarify vies with the cinematic need to dramatise, reaching a feverishly literal extreme in scenes of a paranoid schizophrenic being pursued by a giant eye…

A dramatised documentary featuring Adrienne Corri, made to recruit women for training as nurses in ‘mental hospitals.’ It takes a deeply humane and stylistically vivid approach. Some of the treatments shown would be considered unsuitable today.

This is a half-reel film telling its audience how to use inedible parts of plants from their garden to make compost. It seems pretty basic stuff, but there were a lot of city boys working in what were called Victory Gardens in the United States. Letting them know how easy it was to make compost for a better truck garden meant a lot of fresh food on the home front.