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I always thought this was a particularly odd little film. It seems to be filled with the most ill- mannered cast of any movie I have ever seen. It opens with the Royal Artillery survey unit on Salisbury Plain ignoring a arrival of the UFO. The officer protests and the NCO ignores him and carries on reading his magazine. The officer stomps off in disgust. The action then moves to a cottage hospital where all the staff are permanently at daggers drawn: "I'm in charge here!!.... Mind your own business, etc etc." "How dare you!!!" I couldn't help thinking there was some emotional back-story that had ended up on the cutting room floor. That might account for the way everybody kept overreacting at the slightest provocation. Or have I got it all wrong and that's how British people behaved in the mid 1960s. The aliens must have thought they had landed in an insane asylum.

This had the potential to be a great little series. The producers had the opportunity to present the works of little known, private film makers of the 1930's in context. Sadly they became carried away by projecting their own values on the period works. They needed to try and remember that it was not, perhaps, surprising that bourgeois home movies were unlikely to include the kind of social polemic of the modern, revisionist historian.

So what we ended up with, cut into the gorgeous images, was a procession of talking heads making wise pronouncements well after the events in question. There was a lot of smug superiority that left a sour taste in the mouth. Add to that the splicing in of a lot of irrelevant black and white stock footage of Nazis goose-stepping in Nuremburg. Personally, I didn't need such a grossly tabloid reminder that the world was teetering on the brink.

The Baby is a fairly audacious exploitation movie covering one of the more obscure areas of sexual fetishism. That is to say male infantilism. It is not particularly pornographic but is certainly designed to appeal to the fantasies of the fem-dom enthusiast. The production qualities are high enough to take it out of the schlocky, Ed-Wood, B-movie genre. But the overall feel is of a sad, lonely man in a raincoat, thumbing his way through the pages of a paperback in a Soho basement.

If we accept that then we can celebrate this curious little film for it's triumph. It has managed to transcend the limitations of bourgeois taste and provokes us into a new paradigm. If it had been directed by Peter Greenaway it would have been showered with awards. God rot it!!