In July 1948, when the Attlee government created the new National Health Service, it had to think carefully about how to communicate with the British public. One of its strategies was an animated film entitled Your Very Good Health. This can be watched on the National Archives website, as part of their digital archive of a number of British government information films — alongside this one, you can watch some glorious footage of the 1951 Festival of Britain; a film offering to put the Suez Crisis ‘in perspective’ from 1960; the original ‘Protect and Survive’ shorts; or Dave Prowse and his Green Cross Code. Or why not peruse the rich selection of the videos that terrified you as a child: the Aids Monolith, ‘Heroin Screws You Up’, ‘Lonely Water’, or a horrifying film about children climbing into disused fridges that left a generation of young people terrified of white goods.

These films shaped British people’s understanding of the world, communicating government messages often by being funny, or scary, or otherwise appealing to viewing instincts, as the nation became more and more comfortable with receiving information via cinema screens and, then, television sets. The films were created by the Central Office of Information, set up by Attlee in 1946. The Ministry of Information had been shut down at the end of the war, but the government recognised the utility of creating clear information for public consumption (still, in documents in the 1940s, called ‘propaganda’ with no hint that this had any negative connotations) and so the COI was born, and existed until its closure in 2011.

Your Very Good Health is an animated film created by the wife-and-husband team Joy Batchelor and John Halas. Between them, they wrote, directed, and produced more than seventy propaganda films for the British government, as well as other films including the 1954 animated Animal Farm. Their signature style is clear in Your Very Good Health, which follows a character called Charley first on his bicycle and then into his home, explaining the benefits of a universal healthcare system. Charley featured in a number of animated Halas and Batchelor films; he and the viewer discovered new towns, the coal mines, the Marshall Plan, and the National Insurance scheme, whilst his son Charley Junior provided an introduction to the Education Act and school reform.

Your Very Good Health starts with Charley being unimpressed by the prospect of the NHS, and is gradually won over by the narrator. Charley initially rejects the idea that British people currently pay for healthcare — he’s ‘on the panel’, covered through his employer via his insurance payments and the panel system. But the narrator insistently reminds him that his wife and children aren’t covered, among around half the British population. The narrator also reminds him that a potential bicycle accident (animated in amusing swoops and swirls) would be far less economically onerous under the NHS, given that hospital stays weren’t covered by the panel system.

The viewer and Charley then go into his home, where the prospect of his wife getting ill is raised — again, Charley is initially scathing, saying his wife is ‘strong as a blooming horse’, until she gently points out that mothers can’t ‘afford’ to be ill. The film then highlights the ways that women and children would benefit under the NHS: home nursing, health visitors, home help services, and maternity and child welfare programmes. Gender, and gendered notions of well-being and welfare are salient in Your Very Good Health, and men’s obliviousness to their wives’ bodily needs is highlighted and critiqued.

Class, too, is explored in the film — at the end, a newly-evangelical Charley goes to see a wealthy neighbour who says he will continue to pay for a private bed (as Charley concedes, ‘if you want to pay private fees, that’s your look out’) but, faced with the prospect of a nasty injury and the need for lengthy specialist care, is grateful to hear that he will be able to call on the NHS services as well. The principle of universal care is fudged a little, then, to win over those who feared that this would necessarily mean a lower standard of care..

Since 1948, the NHS has since taken on a totemic, mythic status in the British national imaginary. But its conception, the gratitude of the British public was not assumed. Instead, the government wanted to win over a population that they felt needed to be convinced as to the utility of universal, free-at-the-point-of-access medical care. The government did not present the NHS as if they were handing out medical largesse like beneficent fairy godmothers. Your Very Good Health captures a curious time before the national religion of the NHS, before Clap for Carers: a moment of scepticism and uncertainty among the British public.