Every Day Except Christmas

This is a historic record of Covent Garden market before it relocated in 1974.It was sponsored by Ford in the days when many big companies had film units.The phography is excellent but the commentary is slightly pretentious.

naive yet beautiful black and white footage of covent garden market from early in the morning when the fruit,flowers and vegetables are brought in from all over Britain to the late morning as the old ladies pick up the cheap bargains. distinctly of another era which in turn looks back to an older generation that is on the verge of extinction. i love the naivety of this short. the voice over is so patronising....but it cant be helped....this is a genuine, socially conscious middle class look at working class life.....with all the problems that brings....but you can suspend your belief easily by travelling to that time and place......and you are there....cause this is a documentary that wants to take you there....although it is in black and white and some of the footage is of brightly coloured flowers and fruit you can almost see the colours and smell the fruit.....we see local farmers and businesses flourishing....its a very positive look at the beauty and the pride of the small business........i find the insight fascinating and very warm....but i can see why some people might be appalled by the tone of the narrator.......it still has the tones of 'nightmail' from a few decades before...........but it was a new voice in cinema so we should listen! this was part of a series called 'free cinema' and included 2 other shorts....one called 'we are the lambeth boys' and the other called 'when Saturday comes'......the lambeth boys directed by Karel Reisz (Saturday night Sunday morning) i find just as charming (i'm not selling this well am i).....features around one of the very new 'youth clubs' in south London in the early 50s and celebrates the dawn of UK youth culture.....fantastic stuff this!!!.....east enders from the 50s.....great dance hall scenes....teddy boys jiving and all that stuff....gotta be of some interest to those rockabilly cats.........we follow the youth club cricket team as they travel to north London to play a charity cricket match with a boys public school team......again a very patronising tone to the narration but i can see past that to the footage that we're privileged to see.........the third short 'when Saturday comes' features a very young bobby Robson as we see the cut throat life of a footballer through the lives of contract players at west bromich Albion football club......again of great interest to football buffs.......both these 2 have killer soundtracks from UK jazz legend johnny dankworth.......and a few bass lines for the beat-heads....keep it on the low....shhhhhhhhhhhhh..............my favourite docs ever!!!!

Alun Owen narrates this rather lengthy, but still quite interesting documentary about twenty four hours in the life of London's world-famous Covent Garden market. From the dead of night when mushrooms and flowers start to arrive until the early dawn when buyers descend on the place and the bustle gets into full flow, this illustrates how everything from an artichoke to a daffodil gets supplied to restaurants, cafés and florists. Daniel Paris provides quite a jolly score to underpin this - and what's really noticeable is the well mannered-ness of it all. People drink their tea from cups and saucers, they say please and thank you and even at the height of the market-making, they are civil and respectful of each other. By eleven o'clock, they all look ready for a pint and their beds but they still have the late-coming bargain hunters to accommodate! It's perhaps not the quickest paced documentary you will ever watch, but it's still quite an entertainingly delivered piece of community-based nostalgia featuring folks who started their working lives when Victoria was Queen and where the Salvation Army band do the cheering up before, well it all happens again - except on December 25th!

Covent Garden isn't there any more. It relocated in 1974 to Nine Elms. Before then, it had been a fruit, vegetable and flower market, surrounded by Inigo Jones architecture that has fallen into desuetude. And in 1957, the Ford Motor Company commissioned Lindsay Anderson to make this documentary about a typical day at the market. It begins around midnight, with the trucks rolling in to deliver the goods, and the men and women setting up the displays. It ends the next night with the trucks rolling out, and the next day's trucks rolling in, while bands and the musicians on the score play brass-heavy tunes -- mostly "In The Good Old Summertime" and variations on it.

Like all good documentarians, Anderson shows us the faces of the people thereabouts. They're ordinary faces, which is just fine. And he shows us a couple of extraordinary ones: the last porteress at the flower market, where once they were all woman, and a woman who has come to buy violets and buttonieres to sell on the street for sixty years. It captures the eternal sameness of the market and the transience of this version of it beautifully.