Support: "A Day in the Life..."

In one of those archival projects you just hope won't be rendered impossible in future years by proposed funding cuts, the BFI has turned its focus upon the unfashionable yet hugely rewarding subject of British post-War documentary - in particular those (often sponsored) shorts that played alongside theatrical releases of the era, and contributed so much to our sense of national identity. Launching a season of retrospectives and talks is the touring programme A Day In The Life - Four Portraits of Post-War Britain, a deeply evocative compilation of four such shorts that established the writer-director John Krish as among the period's very best chroniclers of domestic life, travelling as they do across the length and breadth of the country to survey the processes of change at work - and to highlight where further change may be required.

1953's The Elephant Will Never Forget, typical supporting fare in most respects, marks the final running of trams through London's Elephant and Castle interchange - a fond farewell, set to communal singalongs from the Lewisham Darby and Joan Club. The unexpectedly moving They Took Us to the Sea, from 1961, follows a group of Birmingham pre-teens undertaking an NSPCC-backed outing by train to Weston-super-Mare (a.k.a. "Midlands-on-Sea"). The kids' own voiceover highlights their own particular preoccupations ("We had fish-and-chips for dinner; a lot of us just had the chips"), while Krish and editor Fergus McDonnell contrast the breezy coast with the bombsites then still prevalent in Britain's inner cities; we're struck by just how utopian Weston could seem at the time - and that these under-privileged youngsters would eventually grow into a leisured class for whom holidays by the sea would be not a treat, but a regular occurrence.

1962's Our School, sponsored by the NUT, offers several hours in the life of one of the country's exciting new secondary moderns: between the wall bars and misplaced apostrophes, we observe the daring introduction of a Doris Lessing short story to the syllabus ("It teaches us you can't crush man's spirit"). It's of note for the slightly stiff spontaneity of its teaching sequences: the show is comprehensively stolen by one cheeky tyke who gets excited at his history mistress's fleeting reference to dancing girls. The topper, though, is 1964's I Think They Call Him John, which reveals a public-service filmmaker at the very peak of his abilities. The most formally daring of the four shorts, it follows widower John Ronson ("old miner, old soldier, old gardener, old age pensioner," as Victor Spinetti's narration has it) as he goes about a limited existence in a poky council flat, to long stretches of silence: he puts the budgie out, he answers a letter from a sister living in America, he prepares a modest lunch, he nods off at the table.

It's a masterpiece of its kind: utterly unpatronising about the plight of the elderly, with a punchline (involving a still-extant television favourite) every bit as devastating as one might find in a Douglas Sirk tearjerker. And it still functions as conscience-pricker, too: if the fate of this old soldier doesn't get you to shell out for a Remembrance poppy, nothing will. This final short - slowing itself to John's own pace, asking us to shuffle a mile in his carpet slippers - is exceptional in more ways than one: elsewhere in the compilation, the use of music and editing is remarkably sharp and clipped, the films forever in a hurry to get where they're going - filled with a hope and optimism (that, perhaps, of a nation entering a period of rebuilding and prosperity) that our present administrators might do well to take note of. As the daytrippers file past the camera to board the train back to Snow Hill, or John Ronson settles into his flat for the evening, we ask the same questions of Krish's subjects as we might do today observing the occupants of pushchairs parked outside a child-benefit office, or those hustling and bustling to secure themselves a place at university: whatever will become of them?

A Day in the Life - Four Portraits of Post-War Britain opens in selected cinemas tomorrow.