During the second world war, British film was propaganda film. Cinema was the dominant popular medium, and the British state intervened in every part of the film industry.

From Alexander Korda to Humphrey Jennings via Desert Victory, Mrs Miniver and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the era routinely described as the “golden age” of British cinema was also the period when British film was conspicuously shaped by the demands of wartime propagandists.

Despite the fact that the second world war remains perhaps the dominant moral and cultural frame for understanding the contours of the contemporary world, this phenomenon has received surprisingly little consideration.

Partly, this is because it’s assumed (wrongly) that propaganda must be insincere, if not untrue; and partly it’s because Britain was at war with Nazi Germany. If winning the war demanded that the audio-visual world had to be entirely reshaped, and with it the national imagination, so be it.

But this is complacent and uncurious. Film came of age with the modern state. From the outset, the ability to blend fact, fantasy and fiction into novel and attention-grabbing forms made it the perfect medium for propaganda. It should be no surprise that the story of propaganda – like the story of the British state – has always been embedded in the history of British film.

If propaganda film was an activity that had been only reluctantly indulged, its history should have ended in 1945. Instead, in the decades after the Suez Crisis – and in response to decolonisation and the threats of the cold war – it was reconfigured. The second world war wasn’t an exception, it was the norm.

In her seminal work Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders detailed the CIA’s programme of surreptitious Cold War cultural patronage. We can see something similar at work in the UK’s information services.

The British propaganda film operated across a broad cultural palette. In TV series like The Pacemakers, the Central Office of Information (COI) promoted a new generation of British professionals “shaking up” the cultural world.

From the North Kensington Law Centre to Monty Python, via Erin Pizzey, Mary Quant and David Bowie, many of our celebrated icons of late 20th-century Britishness – a generation that have now passed from “counterculture” to “subject of an exhibition at the V&A” – were boosted in this way.

Although never shown in Britain, for decades COI series like London Line, This Week in Britain, British Sporting Personalities, The Enthusiasts and The Pacemakers attracted overseas audiences in their millions.

In addition to giving a platform to figures such as Lionel Ngakane, Jumoke Debayo and (now) Lord Boateng, the African version of London Line, for instance, sold British universities, medicines and expertise in prefabricated construction abroad.

This pro-democracy propaganda self-consciously positioned itself against the norms established by interwar totalitarianism. But even at the time it generated ambivalent responses.

One notable commentator was the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who observed that the postwar period had seen propaganda orient away from managing mass politics and towards servicing the psychological anxieties of a growing middle class.

If the propaganda film of the early 20th century had seen its ambitious political sweep replaced by a new postwar focus on buttressing individual identity, this was not because it had been politely defanged, but because its ideological appetites had expanded. Propaganda, feared Ellul, had become endemic: people demanded it, they required its reassurance, its templates, its models, to cope with the contradictions of the modern world.

Ellul’s thesis was not without its critics, but his prediction proved correct; even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the history of the propaganda film (again) did not come to an end.

Initially, there was an observable shift from the state underwriting of culture as a good in itself towards a form of subsidy that saw film as an important way to package cultural heritage – from Derek Jarman to Paddington – into a form that encouraged inward investment; or more realistically, sold holidays to foreign visitors.

But since 7/7, new institutional sponsors such as the Research, Information and Communications Unit (Ricu) have been flooding the digital space with audio-visual propaganda.

In terms of volume of content, we are living through the heyday of the propaganda film. On an individual basis the short films may not be that interesting; instead the effort is to shape a culture. In the contemporary world the propaganda film has become ubiquitous.

From the Counter-Disinformation Unit to the Army’s 77th Brigade the work of these new agencies is always justified as a response to threats against national security. No doubt it is.

In his essay Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argued that the post-industrial economy generates many white-collar jobs that – functionally speaking – do not need to exist, but which instead encourage a whole swathe of society to identify with the perspectives of big finance.

With some risk of overstatement, we can see something analogous in the propaganda film. We live in a world where the British state has become the nation’s largest advertiser, while the media industry sucks up enormous numbers of graduates. Ricu has apparently sold its expertise to governments throughout Asia, Africa and Europe as well as to the EU through an international offshoot. The propaganda film has become a service that can be exported.

Numerous intellectuals, writers and film-makers are actively employed in the psychological, technological and sociological reshaping of the world, a scenario which perhaps also makes them the ones most exposed to – and susceptible to – the claims of the propaganda film.

Our image of propaganda is stuck in the 1930s, with the visionary, transformative films of Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein. But today the propaganda film is less about individual objects than about shaping an audio-visual environment.

It has become extremely difficult to sustain the idea that the propaganda film is something that only other people – mainly bad people – do to us. Or even that there is something particularly unBritish about it.

• Scott Anthony’s book The Story of British Propaganda Film is published on 3 October. Watch his playlist here