Grenoside sword dancers in 1965.When you've seen a teenage boy running through a village with a flaming barrel of tar on his head, you might think you've seen everything. But then you indulge yourself further in Here's a Health to the Barley Mow – the BFI's DVD celebrating British folk customs and rural games – and an even stranger Britain comes to light. Here are men swinging fireballs in Aberdeenshire. Here's a boy dressed up as a horse for a Mummers' play in Derby, in sheepskin, with lightbulbs for eyes. Here are the dwile flonkers of Suffolk, led by a man the spitting image of Vic Reeves, who explains, with some glee, what their tradition demands. "A capacity to take beer, I should think – and to be an idiot."
This DVD may showcase national eccentricity gloriously, but it's not a simple, silly trek through ye olde Merry Britain. Instead, the disc reveals the peculiar rituals that have persisted here. In Ottery St Mary in Devon, tar barrel rolling was still going strong in 2000, for instance, as is sword dancing in Grenoside, Sheffield, and horn dancing in Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire.
BFI curators Vic Pratt and Will Fowler began this project in 2009, wanting to reveal to the world this rich, other Britain. That year, they showed three folk films, successfully, at London's Cecil Sharp House; Pratt is convinced the recent increased interest in folk music helped it succeed. "I think the technological, capitalist bubble just went to the nth degree, and burst," he says. "Then you had people embracing arts and crafts, making stuff themselves, going back to simpler things, because everything else is so dazzling and busy." Fowler adds that uncertainty in international politics has perhaps led to people exploring their roots again. "I think people are craving something authentic, even spiritual from that." He also thinks the internet's capacity to store and share the past helped this collective desire – but knew he and Pratt could go further, given their resources.
The Barley Mow DVD compiles dances and songs, extreme sports, and strange customs, in the form of news reports from regional TV, amateur footage, and experimental cinema. So alongside raw 1927 footage of the Llandudno May Queens, there is Leslie Daiken's 1957 Free Cinema award-winner about children's games, One Potato, Two Potato, and a fascinating spool of the English Folk, Dance and Song Society founder, Cecil Sharp, dancing in a garden with friends in 1912. This early "film" was made from photographs printed on card and mounted on a wheel, and is brought to musical life with a new fiddle-led soundtrack.
Some films explore how customs can change. The 1953 documentary Oss Oss Wee Oss shows the people of Padstow in Cornwall wearing red and white for the cameras of folklorist Alan Lomax – brilliantly, Pratt says, they have done the same ever since. Recent films such as 2005's Hare Pie and Bottle Kicking, Hallaton show how customs often operate on the fringes of health and safety rules – it shows one rugby-shirted youngster knocked out in a field, rather than emerging from the ruck with the winner's meaty prize. "It's just as important to include those details," Pratt says. "They are part of our world, rather than something that's gone."
More than anything, however, the curators didn't want to judge any of their 43 films on moral grounds "We just wanted to present this stuff as it was," Pratt says, "with respect. There's no point in patronising people when all this stuff is still emerging from ancient traditions. And no one really knows what they're for, do they? Or why they're still here."
Here's a Health to the Barley Mow: A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games is out on 18 July on BFI DVD.
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