Watch Mark Kermode find 1950s political attitudes in 1950s films

The new series of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema began with an episode on British comedy films. As ever, Kermode was terrific at demonstrating how persistent certain characters and ideas in his chosen genre have proved to be. He traced the theme of ‘the little man’ from George Formby and Norman Wisdom to Paddington Bear, paying due attention to its origins in Britain’s most successful early film export, Charlie Chaplin. Moving on to the subset of little men who think they’re bigger than they are, his judiciously chosen clips revealed how much Captain Mainwaring owes to Captain Waggett in 1949’s Whisky Galore! whom we even saw uttering the phrase ‘I wondered when you were going to think of that’ after an obvious mistake was pointed out to him.

Hyper-awareness of class also featured prominently, and so of course did British unease about sex. As Kermode shrewdly suggested, one reason for the huge success of The Full Monty and Calendar Girls may well be that they depicted Brits achieving the ability to get naked without overwhelming embarrassment for the first time in our cinematic history.

Yet — and perhaps precisely because he knows all these movies so intimately — one thing Kermode rather missed is how deeply peculiar many old-school British comedy films are when objectively viewed.