HOGSNORTON [Main Title]

Second World War British Ministry of Information newsreel trailer featuring comedian Gillie Potter performing a fast paced and witty monologue encourging people to save fuel

The film opens with Gillie Potter standing in a studio set of a dining room of a baronial hall delivering his famous line opening line "Good Evening England, this is Gillie Potter speaking to you in English". He continues with his monologue, proporting to read a letter from his brother in Hogsnorton who is employed testing for the Ministry of Alcohol, "whose journey was really necessary" and who travelled by train which "owing to the coal shortage, now makes its outward trip on a sack of unsound shallots and returns on a case of condemned kippers". His brother writes of the ways that the residents of Hogsnorton save fuel including "Lord Marshamallow, the Bishop of Soho and Lapland and the Station Master of Beacon's Bottom all in the same bath with the water no higher than the bridge, not of their nose, but of their toes". In Hogsnorton there is "No coal for transport, no coal for cooking, no coal for heating and yet life goes on merrily, healthily and happily". Potter then asks the audience "What about your town and your house and yourself? Are you burning the bedstead in your boudoir? Are you cooking your cocoa on a candle? If not, why not? Remember, war goes on, but in the battle for fuel the order is "cease firing!".

35mm