Chicago: First Impressions of a Great American City

Morning in the Streets

An impressionistic BBC documentary portraying a northern English city at dawn through street scenes and recorded voices, blending observation and sound montage to capture postwar working-class life.

World in Action

World in Action was Granada Television’s flagship ITV current affairs series, running from 7 Jan 1963 to 7 Dec 1998, and built a reputation for film-led investigative reporting and a forceful editorial stance. Its journalism produced major public and political repercussions—including investigations associated with miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six—and it also served as a platform for landmark documentary projects, including the first broadcast of “Seven Up!” as part of the strand in 1964.

In Prison

In Prison (1957) is a BBC documentary examining daily life inside HMP Strangeways Prison in Manchester. Filmed within the institution, the film observes prisoners and officials as part of a closed system housing hundreds of inmates, focusing on routines, discipline, confinement, and the psychological effects of incarceration. Avoiding dramatization, the documentary presents prison life as an enclosed social world, shaped by regulation, isolation, and repetition, offering a rare contemporary view of Britain’s penal system in the postwar period.

Quentin Crisp

Five years before the TV adaptation of The Naked Civil Servant made him a household name, Quentin Crisp - dandy, raconteur, life model and former prostitute - welcomed celebrated filmmaker Denis Mitchell into his dusty London bedsit. Crisp recalls the violence and fascination his extraordinary appearance once provoked, offers tips on avoiding housework and subsisting on a diet of stout and meal replacement powder, and ruminates on life as a "minority within a minority - an effeminate homosexual".