“We come along on Saturday morning Greeting everybody with a smile.
We come along on Saturday morning Knowing it is well worth while.
As members of the GB club We all intend to be Good citizens when we grow up and champions of the free.
We come along on Saturday morning Greeting everybody with a smile, smile, smile. Greeting everybody with a SMILE!”
And that was just the kids who attended Gaumont British (GB) cinema clubs on a week(end)ly basis!
Other Saturday morning matinee merriment was available, e.g. over at the rival ABC chain (“Such a happy crowd are we, we’re all pals together, we’re Minors of the A…B… C!”). Whichever corporate giant was taking your Imperial sixpence (tickets stayed at that price until decimalisation in 1971) and leading the sing-along, since 1927 it had been possible for parents to pack their kids off to a safe environment (there to stuff themselves with sweets and fizzy drinks as Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Popeye the Sailor Man and co did their respective stuff) while Mum and Dad caught up with the shopping, any work that needed doing around the house or perhaps, if they were lucky, certain other underindulged aspects of marital life. Sounds like a sweet arrangement all round, but not everybody was happy.
Gaumont/Odeon honcho Lord J Arthur Rank, principally remembered these days for setting up a Charm School, employing a succession of well oiled, muscular gong bashers and as a particularly saucy component of cockney rhyming slang, was also a convinced Methodist and socially aware kind of British movie mogul, much concerned that the preponderance of American content in this cinematic diet was not quite the thing on which to rear good citizens and champions of the free.