Pattern for Progress

Who needs to talk to strangers when you're the only one who can understand the garbled mewling of your best buddy cat, Charley?

Don’t listen to Slacky the Sloucher or Giro the Germ will stage a jailbreak – public health cartoon by the Health & Cleanliness Council

Ye Gods! It’s the future of telecommunications – as seen through a cartoon modern lens from the 1950s

Bloody foreign cows coming over here and becoming our dinners

Dangerously addicted to boring old movies? This is a case for Dr BFI, as demonstrated in this 1970s animated promo

Do you know the golden rules of tea making? The Tea Bureau set out to put your cuppa straight in this progressively designed post-war cartoon

Owen Humberstone Prosser, an expert on railways and canals, captured the Crumlin Viaduct on film in 1959, before its demolition in 1967, a victim of the Beeching rail cuts.

RTB, the Ebbw Vale steel company, records a town highlight, preparations for which have been in train a year, involving organisers, competitors, quarrymen and steel workers.

Richard Thomas & Co. Ltd (later Richard Thomas and Baldwins) brings government-backed hope to depressed Ebbw Vale with new steelworks.

The steel industry: the men engage with gigantic machines on a huge scale; the apprentice boys help and holiday; the women have their hair done with the stars.

Only connect: a little Welsh Lady doll, a steel rocking horse, burning Schnapps and the “Limestone Special”.

Mighty machines are seen here at the works of the Ebbw Vale Steel, Iron and Coal Company Ltd, like the Bessemer Converters which can hold 1,000 tonnes of molten iron.

The director of a documentary about British funk pioneers Cymande joins the band at BFI Southbank to talk about the film.

Plotting world domination, Devil Doctor Fu-Manchu steals plans for a new aero-torpedo in this earliest surviving thrill-a-minute serial instalment.

Filmmakers Jane Giles and Ali Catterall discuss their documentary Scala!!!, revisiting the legendary and inspirational cinema venue and some of the most notorious films that screened there.

Long thought lost, this Powell-directed promotional short for a veteran’s charity was only rediscovered in 2003.

A poignant, stirring letter from a recently deceased pilot to his mother is read by John Gielgud.

Former Bristol Poet Laureate, Miles Chambers reads a poem specially commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the NHS.