Exit Miss Arty, in a sulk

A breathless newly-wed couple, laden with gifts from well-wishers, enters their new apartment, which they have yet to furnish. They gurgle with anticipated pleasure but there is a note of apprehension in the air. The man has a dishevelled appearance, having had to carry one of their presents on his head. His hair is a mess. “You look like a golliwog!” exclaims his excitable wife. We are, you will gather, a long way from the 21st century.

Why the apprehension? Because they do not really know how to decorate their home. Opening their presents is no help at all. Among them is a tray for visiting cards, and a “smoker’s companion” side table. They don’t look right. “Are we sure what we like?” asks the wife anxiously. “You – and a cup of tea!” responds her jaunty husband with bravado, but he is papering over the cracks. They look around forlornly. Every bare wall is a problem, every corner a challenge.

But here come their first house visitors, the ghostly shapes of two women, Miss Arty and Miss Design. Miss Arty, played with near-demented hauteur by Joyce Grenfell, is full of airs and graces. She advises the young couple to be creative with expansive patterns and fussy accoutrements. Miss Design has a different message. There are only three questions they must ask of their prospective interiors: does it work? Is it well-made and genuine? Is it attractive? The couple prefers her sensible approach. Miss Arty exits in a sulk.

Designing Women, a short black-and-white film released by the Central Office of Information in 1948 and newly available on DVD, is a minor masterpiece of British cultural history. The debate between art and design (what a long time it has been with us!) is presented in an amusing and pointed way. But there is another dialectic at play: the very struggle for British identity.

The pretentious absurdities of Miss Arty belong to a different age, a flaccid, pompous era, lacking in practicality and prone to stupendous errors of taste and judgment. That wasn’t the Britain that had just won the war. That country is embodied in Miss Design, brisk, no-nonsense, full of sound reasoning. Here is the spirit of the future, guiding our hapless, upwardly mobile couple on the road to prosperity and well-designed comfort. We didn’t send Spitfires into the skies for the greater good of flowered pelmets and tea cosies.

It was a difficult point to pull off in the 1940s: it was important for Miss Design, with her emphasis on form following function, not to appear like some avenging angel of the Bauhaus, a movement that was associated with the just-vanquished foe. But Miss Design strikes the right chord. She is pretty, quietly spoken, reliable: in these values lay the modest might of little Britain.

Something of the same tone of voice can be detected in another film that appears alongside Designing Women in an excellent new BFI compilation from the COI archive. Brief City is a 19-minute recollection of 1951’s Festival of Britain, a celebration on the South Bank of the Thames that left us with the Royal Festival Hall, and a socio-architectural vision of London that continues to resound today.

It was, as the learned commentary informs us, a very British affair. It may have been a festival but there were no grand ceremonial announcements, no processions, no sense of symmetry, even. If Leni Riefenstahl had been in town, she would have sloped off dejectedly to catch the next plane to the Continent. The British “don’t like rhetoric in their buildings”, says the voiceover; they exalted, instead, in that “sudden sense of space and leisured gaiety” that the festival provided. They were even moved to dance in public, albeit “grotesquely, in their overcoats”.

The shadow of the war continued to loom large. The aims of the Festival of Britain were not merely cultural but more broadly human: to establish brotherhood and banish enmity between nations. It was a tall order, yet it was felt to have been achieved. There was, in the words of the film’s co-narrator Patrick Donovan, “no resounding, proud message” to be taken from the festival, and that was a success in itself. “No one was told to hate anything,” he adds. “It was a national exhibition that tried to stay rational.”

As with Miss Design’s makeover advice, here was a celebration of common sense and quietude. Culture was conceptually twinned not with extravagance and unbounded originality but with a dignified sense of restraint and decorum. In a more Dionysic age – the 1960s were around the corner, and we are still in thrall to its playful excesses – the exhortation to “stay rational” may appear plain boring. But can there be a more noble message?

We are long past the point of a Central Office of Information dispensing soft furnishing advice; it sounds a little Orwellian to our ears. But it put that Miss Arty in her place, for a while at least.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden

‘Design for Today: The COI Collection, Volume Two’ (BFI) is released on March 22