Other films tackled the war to boost morale while also providing information and narratives about the contemporary experiences, within the documentary realist format. The Second World War was the ‘people’s war’ - the first where women were involved just as much as men, and we can see the two strands coming through.

Millions Like Us (1943) is the story of a young, single, working class girl going into the munitions factory; while Mrs Miniver (1942) made by William Wyler for MGM, features a middle class wife during the first year of the war. It was the most successful film of 1942, and not just in Britain, but totally decried by the purist critics of the realist tradition. Miniver was seen a Hollywood melodrama and raised the questions of who constructs the stories, whose voice is it?

Here, the depiction was considered as being filtered from an American point of view, albeit a very sympathetic one. MGM British had established as a huge film studio in north London at the end of the 30s and produced one of the classic public school stories Goodbye Mr Chips (1939), which also reinforced that very Hollywood-version construction of Britain - one which was not all that dissimilar to those of George Orwell or Stanley Baldwin.

A key critic of this approach was Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, who favoured "realism" over "tinsel" - with a clear allusion to Hollywood as Tinseltown. Although Ealing is best remembered for its comedies, Balcon was most proud of realist accounts such as Scott of the Antarctic (1948) and Dunkirk (1958). Working at Ealing, Basil Dearden developed the "social problem film" within a fictional format, such as The Blue Lamp (1950) dealing with juvenile delinquency, reflecting a contemporary moral panic, and later Sapphire (1959) which dealt with issues of race and immigration following the Notting Hill riots of the previous year. (These issues have been addressed again more recently, but from the point of view of the immigrant community in films such as the Stephen Frears' directed My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985.) Dearden then addressed the highly controversial topic of legalising homosexuality following on from the Wolfenden Report in Victim (1961).

Another strand in the documentary realist tradition was developing in the mid 50s: that of Free Cinema with short documentaries like We Are the Lambeth Boys (Karel Reisz 1958) about a London youth club with a very patronising BBC style voice over, which took a very different approach to The Blue Lamp. These were practically amateur films made by film buffs.

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