INT. ARCADIA CINEMA. AFTERNOON.

As the title of the film fades from the screen the introductory credits roll, in the type and style of a late-forties movie. As they give way to the crowing cockerel of Pathé News we realise we are in a cinema.

NEWSREEL COMMENTATOR   Nineteen forty-seven and Austerity Britain gets a longed-for whiff of glamour as preparations for the wedding of Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth get into full swing.
At the back of the stalls Joyce and her Mother are coming in. Joyce is a thin, genteel woman, given to suffering. Her Mother is the woman who has made her so. As they come in the door Joyce whispers:

JOYCE   Mind where you’re going, Mother. There’s a step.
Mother stumbles.

MOTHER   You didn’t say there was a step.
Joyce and Mother go down the aisle as the urgent voice of the newsreel commentator lets us into a secret: the wedding cake for the forthcoming nuptials was made with ingredients supplied by Australian Girl Guides.
Joyce and Mother are now seated and looking up at the screen, though at a curiously acute angle. Indeed the screen seems almost above their heads.
It hurts your neck here.
Now the newsreel begins a fresh item: the announcement of a cut in the bacon ration. We see a week’s food rations displayed on a table.
There hardly seems enough for a square meal. A close-up of the bacon ration reveals it as only two rashers, and now a hand comes in and removes one of them: the bacon ration has been halved. Joyce looks at Mother. The halving of the bacon ration seems something of a last straw.
Joyce’s rig-out contrasts strangely with Mother’s.
Mother is in a dowdy coat with a fur tippet, Joyce is resplendent in a turquoise sequinned number with matching accessories. It seems a fancy frock for the afternoon cinema.
The newsreel commentator is now explaining how similar shortages in France have led to a flourishing black market. The implication is that in Britain there is no such thing.

NEWSREEL COMMENTATOR   (winding up) In Britain for the moment our minds are on happier things.
There is another shot of the royal couple as Joyce begins to get restive.