User Reviews

Talking Pictures Channel is an absolute treasure trove to old saddos like me. Rarely does a day pass without my finding some long lost gem which I viewed, either at the pictures or on tv in the early fifties. Skid Kids however, almost had me in tears. I was pulled, almost physically, back to a Saturday morning around 1958 when me and my brother along with a legion of other kids in school caps and short trousers, having queued in an unruly fashion outside the Rosum cinema; then, having paid our sixpence, would have cheered and booed our way through this film. All the time wishing we could have been the kids chasing the crooks on bikes and roller skates and cornering them just as the police arrived in an old Wolesley with a clanging bell. Sorry, I'm rambling! Cracking little number from the Childrens Film Foundation involving bike speedway and a gang of cycle thieves. Believable kids (though some had too posh an accent), comic villains, traffic-free streets. Black and white photography. What more could you want! Except maybe a packet of sweet cigarettes and a penny chew bar!

SKID KIDS is one of the earlier Children's Film Foundation movies I've watched, a feature length black and white effort from 1953 about a gang of kids who spend their days holding local speedway competitions. The film was directed with customary efficiency by director Don Chaffey, best known for the likes of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, and he brings a sheen of quality so that you wouldn't guess this to be a little low budget affair.

I love CFF films because they now act as time capsules to the modern viewer, showing through their backdrops and attitudes signs of a long-disappeared world. Here we get to see the kids running around the streets of Bermondsey and playing in vacant plots that would have once belonged to bombed-out houses. SKID KIDS is a little slow to begin with, but once a criminal gang are introduced to the tale it really picks up, and feels very much like an Enid Blyton mystery adventure along the lines of the Famous Five or Secret Seven.

There's plenty to enjoy here, from the interactions of the non-annoying child actors - it's amazing to see just how organised and mature they are - to the action-packed chase climax. The crooks in this one are so open and blase about what they do that it made my mouth drop open in surprise. I was pleased to discover that there's plenty of humour added into the mix along with the kind of perilous situations that health and safety have long done away with (watch the kids hanging out the back of the speeding taxi, for instance). SKID KIDS is great fun and a treat for fans of old-time nostalgia.