Saturday Lunch

This prize-winning short amateur comedy about a distracted father highlights the best and worst of its times.

Ah, the 1950s. The wife in the kitchen. The working husband in his suit, even at the weekend. The baby parked outdoors in the pram with not a care in the world. The casual use of race in comic punchlines.... The kind of simplistic racial humour seen here would, alas, be a familiar staple of TV sitcoms until well into the 1970s. So it's no surprise to find it cropping up so early in Britain's multicultural era. It's a shame, though, that it spoils a slickly-made amateur short that takes a wry, lightly satirical look at 50s family values.

Saturday Lunch was a product of the prolific Sutton Coldfield Cine Society. As its opening title card proudly declares, it was named one of Amateur Cine World magazine's 10 best amateur films of its year.