91Èȱ¬

This summer Kirsty Wark and Dan Cruickshank set out to find undiscovered home movie gems gathering dust in attics and garages. It's a task, Kirsty tells Press Information's Tony Matthews, that is something of a race against time.

These days, nobody would dream of getting married without having their great day recorded, but when was the first ever wedding video made? The 91Èȱ¬'s Great British 91Èȱ¬ Movie Roadshow may well have found the answer. "The first ever filming of a wedding, as far as we understand, is of the Marquis of Bute," says presenter Kirsty Wark. "Shot on Mount Stewart on the island of Bute in about 1904 or 1905, the film was found in an attic."

That film is one of a number of undiscovered gems that have turned up during a series of roadshows in London, Falmouth, Bradford and Glasgow, in which Kirsty and co-presenter Dan Cruickshank, joined by experts from the British Film Institute and regional film archives, assess the value of more than 1,000 pieces of film brought in by members of the public.

"A lot of what has come in is beyond repair and of course much of it is just families at the beach," says Kirsty, "but there are also some amazing finds. One item brought in by a grandmother, who appears in the film as a three-year-old, shows her family taking tea at the beach with servants all around, and that's really interesting.

"We've found lots of domestic stuff, showing the changing nature of the family and fashion," she adds, "but also material revealing how consumerism has changed. There's also some extraordinary film of historic events such as footage from an enterprising guy who filmed the raising of the German High Seas Fleet after it had been scuttled at the end of the First World War. Things like that are out of the ordinary and wonderful to have."

The idea of Great British 91Èȱ¬ Movie Roadshow, Kirsty says, is to develop a new way of using old material to reveal a different and very intimate picture of Britain; one that is about personal social history but which also shows how society has changed and how events have shaped people's lives. "Dan and I hope that it's a warm, informal and friendly show, but it has a serious and important purpose. Although we've had 1,000 pieces of film brought in, we know that there's a lot more out there and we've got to get to it while it still exists, which may only be another 10 years."

Technical teams trained in the art of restoration are on hand at the roadshows for what, in many cases, is a rescue operation. Film, especially older items, requires professional care to keep it in good condition and many people have simply found items in cupboards or lofts. "A lot of it is in very poor condition and the 91Èȱ¬ and the BFI have been put to work to try to bring it back to some kind of quality that you can actually show," Kirsty explains. "Nitrate film is highly combustible and needs careful preservation. Much of what we see in this series is of varying quality, but in a sense that makes it more magical simply because it has somehow survived having been tucked away in boxes and garages and not treated with loving care."

It's not just quality that varies, though; the range of subject matter is also vast. "Many people bringing in items have no idea of what they've got because they have nothing to play it on," says Kirsty. "It's quite wonderful to see their reaction when we play their films. What makes it so exciting is that there are so many different things. A lot of it is from the Seventies and Eighties on early beta videos and you can see things like New Romantics or football fans going to a World Cup, and in Bradford we received a wonderful film from the Fifties showing old civic buildings which were later knocked down to make way for so-called modernity – without that footage you wouldn't get to see these buildings other than in a few stills."

Other special finds include a film that a collector picked up at a boot sale showing archive of Pablo Picasso at his studio in the south of France, which is thought to have been filmed by an American patron. "One of the most amazing things we got," says Kirsty, "was from Spike Milligan's daughter, Jane, who brought us the most amazing home footage of her dad, in which we see Spike in a completely different light. Part of it shows him and his second wife on honeymoon in Australia. His daughter had no idea what was on the footage, as she'd never watched it. To see him so happy and loving with his family is wonderful."

There is also revealing film of another great comedian, Monty Python's Terry Jones, as a young man already on his way to fame. Black and white footage shows him fooling around with the other Pythons and doing stop-frame animation with his parents in the garden.

Although Great British 91Èȱ¬ Movie Roadshow doesn't take a chronological approach, the story of how home movie making developed during the course of the 20th century is revealed through the array of items discovered. One rare example is the work of a man in Chingford, who has made a film about the town every year for the last 60 years. "That kind of continuous filming is very rare," says Kirsty, "although it also happens in Halifax, thanks to an enthusiastic group of amateurs who model their work on the old newsreels.

"At the beginning, film-making was an expensive medium and the preserve of the very wealthy," she continues. "But into the Twenties and Thirties, cine cameras such as little 16mms and 9.5s became an amazing thing that people could have access to. Of course, it was mainly middle-class people, but we've still got the most extraordinary footage of a man shooting images of his grandfather, who was one of the founders of the market on Portobello Road. This is from the early Twenties and clearly shows how things that people buy have changed."

By the Sixties and into the later decades, the potential of home movie cameras had opened up to people on more limited incomes. "People began to save for cameras and their focus was understandably on holidays or special occasions," she says, "but the roadshows have also turned up some fascinating footage from the early Sixties of a family celebration at Christmas where we can even see what they were eating."

All of these films, she says, help bring the past to life in a way never previously conceived. "There's nothing quite as mesmerising as moving footage, of seeing women in Edwardian dresses, or people dancing in their front rooms at Christmas in the Sixties. One of my favourite pieces comes from before the National Health Service was established. It shows an enterprising Glasgow dentist who picked up an old motor torpedo boat and began doing a month's tour of the Scottish islands to do dentistry – and he filmed it. There's footage of the equipment, the oxygen and people coming on to the boat to be treated. That kind of thing is priceless."