The Children's Film Foundation commissioned and distributed films throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Culturally their contribution is minor but there is undeniable historical interest. This collection packages two 55-minute 'supporting features' directed by Jan Darnley-Smith with three shorts.
Go Kart Go, a black-and-white effort from 1963, featuring rival street gangs (one nice, one nasty) in competition to win a race, could have come straight out of a contemporary comic like The Victor. Although formulaic, simple-minded, and overlong it is a reasonably entertaining diversion, depicting a world now long vanished, where children with names like 'Jimpy', 'Squirt', 'Stiggy', and 'Basher', spent all their time mucking about in sheds and on the local 'rec', using their energy and ingenuity to build contraptions, instead of spending all their time using their energy and ingenuity to build high scores on Playstation. At one point the kids add up the number of parents they have between them: "Let's see, there are six of us so that makes 12 parents." Yes: a world long ago.
Cue scenes of innocent fun in which children cause havoc by riding down the High Street in soapbox carts or a souped-up lawn mower goes berserk, creating comic chaos as it knocks over ladders and policemen. Fascinatingly, the cast includes Dennis Waterman (age 15), latterly of The Sweeney and New Tricks (how time flies!), and Frazer Hines (18) of Doctor Who and Emmerdale Farm. The action is well-staged and Ron Goodwin contributes a jolly and very contemporary score.
A Hitch in Time, though made 15 years later and in colour, looks cheaper and cruder. It was evidently shot on 16mm and both print and sound quality are poor. In the lamentably childish script (by T.E.B. Clarke, of all people) a 'mad inventor' uses his time machine to catapult two children through history, stopping off at various eras, encountering the same people or their ancestors. In a rather sad touch, Patrick Troughton (in this case post-Doctor Who) plays the inventor.
The opportunity to present an entertaining and educational jaunt through history is thrown away in favour of reprehensible caricaturing ("the Dark Ages - witches and things") and cheesy slapstick. In place of the Tardis, Troughton gets OSKA, a talking computer which blows a fuse with tedious predictability, and, in place of a decent score, Harry Robinson contributes some banal electronic burblings. If Go Kart Go does indeed represent the best of The Children's Film Foundation, A Hitch in Time is closer to the worst.
The two comedy shorts from the late 1960s, A Good Deed in Time and The Astronoughts, feature a gang of bungling kids known as The Magnificent Six and 1/2. A chore to sit through, they are short on talent and long on dismally unfunny pratfalls where people fall off things and get stuff thrown over them.