geoffm60295 Review of It's a Great Day!

It's a Great Day! (1955)

A dated, unrealistic and tedious profile of family life in post war Britain.

[4/10 · 17 September 2020]

'It's a Great Day' is a spin off from the BBC's first soap opera, 'The Grove Family' a very popular 1950's TV sitcom about a typical lower middle class family in suburbia designed to present a safe and comfortable image of family life. The film is essentially a snapshot of life in mid 50's Britain. There are lots of gentle misunderstandings between certain family members, but it's all very harmless and disputes are rapidly smoothed over. Lots of smiling add to the benign and sanitised view of how a typical family are coping with post war Britain. The Grove 'family' represent traditional middle class values, where manners are still of paramount importance. The family itself live in a reasonably large suburban house (unlike most folk at the time who lived in small cramped flats or new council houses, no bigger than a shoe box) which accommodates several members of the family, including the stereotypical 'grumpy' gran who trots in and out of rooms, perpetually frowning and criticising all and sundry, which wears thin by the end of the film. The film presents solid stereotypes like Mr Groves, pipe smoking, respected father, hard working breadwinner and a reliable and upright member of the community. His wife, daughter and 'live in gran' are all dutiful, rather scatty and gossip about trivia. The film about the son, Jack Groves, (Peter Bryant) obtaining building materials for his builder father, Bill Groves (Edward Evans) from 'a dodgy bloke, (Charlie Mead, played by Victor Madden) in a pub, meaning they were stolen, lands not only the son in a spot of bother with the police for receiving stolen goods, but also his father. But like all 50's sit coms, it all ends happily, with the family name being left untarnished. There's a sub plot about a visit by a 'Princess' (Presumably Margaret) to the local housing estate which features the work of Mr Groves, but essentially, that's a side show, except at the end when you see the 'Princess' arrive, with lots of genuflecting by the cast. Otherwise, this film is a historical curiosity to historians, wanting to know how television presented images of lower middle class family life. By today's standards it's a whimsical, but tedious film, as the director is so anxious to present a 'sanitised' image of family life, that it drains any sense of realism as to what life was really like in the mid 1950's.