TV Cream

Independent Producers

ASSOCIATED BRITISH PATHE LTD

Charles Pathe formed Pathe Britannia in the early years of the 20th century, and on his retirement in ’29 the company was thusly retitled. Forty years of cockerel-heralded cinema newsreelery followed, but what about non-informative flicks? Well, they took over production of Torchy the Battery Boy after Gerry Anderson bailed out, funded Cliff’s early films including Summer Holiday, got Jimmy Savile to link some promo clips of The Beatles and Alan Price together for Pop Gear, put Joe Brown and Harry H Corbett together as aspiring musical brothers in What a Crazy World, moved away from pop into supernatural fare with The Hand of Night, and combined the two for The Ghost Goes Gear, in which the Spencer Davis Group join their manager Nicholas Parsons in a haunted house. Best work for our money – Norman Rossington’s stolen fire engine daftness Go To Blazes. In 1970 it joined ABPC and Anglo-Amalgamated in being subsumed by the all-powerful EMI.

Click to comment

0 Comments

  1. Edgardo Olaes

    April 9, 2015 at 3:49 pm

    The film studio “Associated British Pathe Ltd” had produced a very popular musical, the “Pop Gear”. It includes The Beatles, The Animals, Matt Monro, etal. In the US, it named “Go, Go Mania” and changed the film distributor’s name into “American-International Pictures”.
    – Edgardo V. Olaes

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top