First released in 1972, but actually shot in the late 1960s (and shown on Channel 4 during the 1980s) , this much loved, and highly acclaimed documentary, tells of the life of the Page family.  They lived in a ramshackle house situated in six acres of woodland, which they owned themselves, in the heart of the commuter-belt, 20 miles south of London. The trees cut the Pages off completely from the outside world, and isolated in their island-clearing, they let the 20th Century slowly pass them by. It was a simple life without running water, electricity or gas. Peter and Jim earned what little money the family needed by doing casual repairs to tractors and farm-machinery in the neighbourhood. Machinery was the permanent obsession of Mr Page and his sons. Their wood is littered with rusty iron carcasses: parts of old engines, disembowelled car-bodies: a pile of gigantic spanners. Most spectacular were the archaic steam traction-engines, a Fowler BB ploughing engine and an Allchin agricultural engine, which the men tinker with and drive thunderously about the woodland to no apparent purpose. The girls, too, have their special preoccupations: Nancy sits at her embroidery; Kathy tends her garden and plays comforting tunes on the harmonium in the house, or on the piano rotting away outside. As the film unfolds each member of the family spells out their personal fantasies and philosophies to the camera. For all their prodigious skills, they seem at first eccentric, quaint; their ideas tangential to our own. But in the end it emerges that they are in control of their world in a way that we can never be in control of ours and, despite the very apparent strangeness of some of what they say, there is a very basic logic there which finds many more echoes today than in did in the 1970s. Compared with today’s reality documentaries, of which this was arguably the father, the pace is slow, allowing the Page’s way of life, and their views on just about everything to gradually emerge, so providing a remarkably true picture of this strange family. Highly entertaining and thought provoking.