Meet Mr Lucifer – 1953 | 83mins | Comedy | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Meet Mr Lucifer was based on a play called Beggar My Neighbour by Arnold Ridley, who in the Twenties had written the melodramatic success, The Ghost Train (television fame awaited him in the Seventies, when he played the senile Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army), it starred Stanley Holloway as the Demon King in an unsuccessful provincial pantomime, who after an accident with the stage trapdoor finds himself in the infernal regions facing Mr Lucifer.

The devil believes that people are being made too happy by television when it should be making them miserable, and the film developed into a laboured and limp attempt at satire, showing how television can indeed make a few people unhappy, including Jack Watling and Peggy Cummins as a young married couple and a Scottish bachelor, Gordon Jackson, who falls in love with the Lonely Hearts singer on the screen, Kay Kendall. The rest of the film details the effects that the boob tube has on otherwise normal, rational British citizens (there’s even time for a swipe at 3D movies).

Perhaps its main interest now is the depiction of the awfulness of television standards in 1953, two years before the first ITV station opened, with appearances by tele-celebrities of the time such as Philip Harben. The film was directed by Anthony Pelissier, brought in from outside because of an unwillingness by the Ealing inner-circle to work on the film, many viewed it has a half-hearted attack on the threat from a new medium… Television!

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.