Harold used well known voices from BBC Radio and Television to read his often pun-filled scripts; Terry Wogan, Nicholas Parsons, Pete Murray, Franklin Engelmann, Peter Dimmock and Telly Savalas to name but a few, all voiced a Baim film or two. The music for nearly all the films came from the well known and popular De Wolfe Music library.

Harold’s films won little critical acclaim when they were first released. Indeed in a book published by the cinema technicians union, the ACTT, in 1966 they said: “… one of Mr. Baim’s more recent productions, A Day with Dino, was entered into the Cork Film Festival in 1965. The British representative on the jury had the greatest difficulty on persuading the remainder of the jury to sit through even 5 minutes of the film.” Harsh criticism indeed from other producers concerning a 30-minute film which followed a day in the life of a Venetian gondolier. The film did eventually win a festival award; the criticism came from contemporaries who had not achieved the commercial success of Harold Baim.

Harold Baim died in 1996. He was in his 80s. His legacy is a collection of films showing a colourful window on life in the middle of the last century. Richard Jeffs who acquired the entire collection saw the films as “part of our social history” and thought they must be preserved and not split up. The Baim Collection is one of the largest collections of its kind in private ownership.

Richard Jeffs acquired all rights to Harold Baim’s work together with all the surviving film prints and negatives. He moved their storage, about 1500 cans to Todd-AO (now Ascent Media) in North London and slowly set about a project to restore and digitise all the titles. “I sometime feel I’m a one-man BFI when it comes to these films” he says. After ten years he has achieved about a third of the project and has now seen 50 of the 150 titles. “It’s a great frustration that I have yet to see two-thirds of the films, and it’s a great excitement when I get another film cleaned and copied. I have enough titles now to consider releasing some of the films on DVD in the hope that brings enough income to finish the project. I’d love to see the films on a big screen in a main cinema. That is where they belong. The problem is that owners of small cinemas I have spoken to say that playing an extra film would put their staff costs up too much. Small cinemas operate on such small profit margins it is not possible to add a “quota quickie”. Playing an extra film would mean paying staff to run a cinema after ten o’clock and extra payments would use up any profit. I do release the Telly Savalas Birmingham film at least once a year to be shown in the City. I have given copies on DVD to the social history department of the Central Library in Birmingham, so anyone visiting the City can see the film for free at any time.

Baim’s first films, made during the Second World War, show variety acts such as Wilson Keppel and Betty. His later travelogues now give us a unique glimpse of our social history – eight minutes were shown on BBC2’s Newsnight in 2006. This is Lebanon, and This is Jordan give us a glimpse of the Middle East in the early 1960s; an important record with web page reviews such as “The "Happier Times in Beirut" segment is a real jaw-dropper; it's incredible to see how cosmopolitan and beautiful Lebanon was in the early ‘60s, long before all the trouble started.” Richard Jeffs says that such comments justify the continued restoration of the films.

The films do make people happy. Richard recalls receiving at e-mail from a man in Essex asking for a copy of one of the Devon films. The correspondent had recently returned home to Essex from a long weekend in Devon with his family. He wrote “It started raining and my granddaughter and I were next to the Museum so we stepped in to avoid the shower. As soon as we stepped inside we saw a large flat-screen TV set playing a big colour film. On the screen I could see myself aged 11, my older brother, Mum and Dad and the two dogs. We were all eating lunch outside a bathing hut in 1957. I’d forgotten the film being taken, but on seeing the film I remember it being made. We had to it wait twenty minutes for the film to play again so I could show my granddaughter her great grand parents and how we had holidays all those years ago”. The Museum put the chap in touch with the South West Film Archive who had organised the showing of the film. In turn they linked the chap to The Baim Collection and Richard Jeffs.

Harold Baim is an accidental historian. The films were made as a commercial proposition to fulfil a particular need. They have survived and offer a distinctive view of the last century. Richard thinks the 1950s films on Devon, the Lake District and East Anglia have some marvellous sequences – a working blacksmith’s, a carpenters lathe making bobbins for the cotton industry and making lobster pots on the sea front in Paignton show ‘a lost world’ – “That would be my dream” says Richard “working on a series of television programmes entitled The Lost World of Harold Baim – when you look at the films you can see our world has changed so much in the last sixty years. Harold Baim’s films do give us all the opportunity to glimpse a lost world – and in wide screen “Eastmancolor”. The negatives have not been disturbed for fifty years and so the results of digitisation make the films look as if they could have been shot last week. Colour film of this period is pretty rare. This may be because main BBC and ITV channels did not start colour transmissions until 1969 and so before that date regional programmes and news features, our ‘social history’, were filmed in black and white. Colour films from the ’50s and ’60s are quite difficult to find”