Riveting – and disgusting: BFI’s ‘Dogs v Cats’ and ‘Eating In’ collections reviewed

This week I’d like to point you in the direction of the British Film Institute and its free online archive collections, which are properly free. There is no signing up for one of those ‘free trials’ which means that, somewhere down the line, you’ll discover you’ve been paying £4.99 a month for something you didn’t want. And it’s certainly excellent value for the money you don’t pay, as there are 65 of these collections, grouped under various headings — ‘Football on Film’, ‘Black Britain on Film’ — although I plumped for ‘Eating In’, because it’s all any of us do now, and ‘Cats v Dogs’, as if that were even much of a competition…dogs! (Cat people: show me a guide cat for the blind or a sniffer cat or a cat that’s pulled its owner from a fire, then we’ll talk cats.)

The films date from the late 19th century through to the modern day and can last from just a few seconds to 30 minutes. The earliest I discovered is from ‘Cats v Dogs’ — also, show me a cat that can herd sheep, then we’ll talk — and is a four-second snippet from 1898 featuring a little girl in a poufy white dress and her dog (a collie cross, by the look of it). It is wonderfully Victorian and sentimental and Pears soap-ish and is titled Me and My Two Friends as there is also a cat in it but that’s okay. You can just ignore it.

It’s all fantastically moreish. There’s whippet racing in Yorkshire from 1970 and a 1943 road safety film starring Labradors driving their own cars to the shops (surreal) and another 1943 government film encouraging people to stub out their cigarettes properly.