Garam's Big Bumper British Bonanza (aka Team GBBBB)

Started by Garam, December 13, 2015, 07:26:51 AM

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Garam

It's my belief that some of the greatest works in the history of British Cinema aired on television. From 1964 - 1989 the BBC had a strand of programming called 'The Wednesday Play/Play for Today/Screen Two'. It was an anthology series that aired individual plays that were usually written specifically for the series (although sometimes there would be adaptations of existing work - by Ingmar Bergman, John Osborne among others). The original remit was to perform social realist dramas about issues that weren't often discussed by the general public, although as time went on, sci-fis and comedies and horrors etc would be included in the strand. It was a huge arena to get a message across - Cathy Come Home in 1966 was viewed by 12 million people, a quarter of the British population at the time. Breaking Bad's finale was viewed by 10 million people in America! The play raised a lot of interest in the issue of homelessness and was even discussed in parliament as a result.

Until 1982 there were only 3 channels on British TV, so if you had a shot at a Play for Today episode you were guaranteed a captive audience of at least a few million people. People treated it as a cheap alternative to paying for the cinema to watch American movies.



Over 400 of these plays were made. Some were shot on film, some were shot on video. Many of them are lost forever, some of them are restored and released on DVD, some of them survive on scratchy VHS rips from archivists, some exist, but only in the BBC's vault. They're a mixed bunch of course, but the general quality is really pretty high. Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Alan Clarke, Michael Apted, Lindsay Anderson...all these people cut their teeth on Play for Today. Some would argue their finest work is here. This show also made writers household names - in the 60s/70s, 40 years before the Golden Age of TV! People would seek out new plays by their favourite writers - the likes of Alan Bleasdale, Dennis Potter and Willy Russell would become recognised by even casual viewers as a mark of quality. It was a monolith of a show, and hugely influential on British culture, from TV to film to music to literature. This is where 'kitchen sink' was fully established.

Anyway, some of these are on youtube and I want to share them with you as I make my way through some of them. I'll start with a classic.

The Black Stuff 1980
by Alan Bleasdale

In the late-'70s Liverpool of fast-rising unemployment, a gang of tar layers strike out in an old transit for a job laying the road in front of a new housing development in Middlesborough. Along the way, one of their number, Yosser Hughes, comes into contact with a pair of Irish gypsies offering a little non-union work laying the road to a nearby farm.

Although released in January 1980, The Black Stuff was completed in October 1978, 7 months before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. It's an incredibly prescient and ominous film, that truly feels like the start of a huge transitional period. It's 'working class drama' but it doesn't veer into polemics, every character is real, no one's a saint, they're not just pawns to make a radical point. This is drama dictated by character rather than agenda (although it is clear the writer has a left-wing view of the world.) It's also funny - it never becomes a morose pit of poverty porn like a lot of later British films that tried to ape its style while missing the point.

Also Bernard Hill (best known to int'l audiences for Titanic/Lord of the Rings) is incredible as Yosser Hughes. His performance in this film and the follow up is one of the greatest screen performances by a British actor ever. It's incredible.



The film became a huge national success, so the BBC commisioned a follow up series, that came along in 1982, well into the Thatcherite era when northern post-industrial cities like Liverpool and Glasgow were becoming west European equivalents of Detroit minus the gun crime.

QuoteAs epoch-defining TV dramas go, Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) certainly left its mark, and not only on its audience. It turned Alan Bleasdale into a household-name scriptwriter, launching an occasionally glorious career. Meanwhile, Yosser himself – actor Bernard Hill – has hinted that the sudden fame the series brought him drove him towards a breakdown. All this, and an Eighties national catchphrase – the immortal 'Gizza job!' – from a Play for Today spin-off.

Back in his youth, Bleasdale's family had set up an asphalt firm, and he had himself served an apprenticeship within it. The firm's loss was TV drama's gain: Bleasdale drew on his experiences when writing a new all-film production, The Black Stuff (1980), about a cash-strapped tarmac gang moonlighting behind their boss' back. A rich, character-driven piece, it displays the writer's affinity for finely-balanced black comedy. Bleasdale had successfully persuaded the BBC to commission a follow-up, capitalising on the possibilities that the network of characters offered. What began as a proposed one-off sequel - about the gang facing unemployment - blossomed into a full series.

It's a five part series, with each episode mostly focusing on one character from the original film with some mild interweaving into each others stories. The whole thing is truly superb, and i would recommend watching it all some time, but i'll focus on one episode in particular (because although it's best watched in order, you can kind of watch each episode in isolation and it doesn't matter too much - pre boxset, pre torrents, it had to be written for new viewers to jump in);

Boys from the Black Stuff: Yosser's Story 1982
by Alan Bleasdale

ahead be spoils



The fourth play, "Yosser's Story", is in part a resolution of the ideological and thematic concerns Bleasdale has developed from the beginning – a resolution into fatality and a stripping away of a man's work, his wife, his friends, his money, his children and ultimately his home. In an audacious mix of high farce, absurdity and acute tragedy, including an encounter with footballer Graeme Souness, Yosser ricochets from one extreme – staid, pointed calm single-mindedness – to the other – explosions of physical violence and vocal anger – in an effort to cling onto his kids and his dignity. Bernard Hill's performance is astonishing. The scene where police arrive to oversee the forced removal of Yosser's children from his care is one of the most harrowing, moving and overwhelming moments in British television drama history. No superlative is really too lavish when trying to do justice to this hour long play.

This is the only episode of the follow up series to be filmed on film. It needed the grain. By this point Yosser Hughes has truly lost his mind and is circling the drain of insanity and destitution, desperate and fearful of leaving his children that he insists follow him around like a pack of feral dogs so that nobody can steal them away from him. It's a really powerful episode/film/performance and the character became a huge icon of 80s Britain - his bleak catchphrase 'gizza job - i can do that' became a national meme for years, used by both the far left and far right.



You really should watch these. Bernard Hill's performance is equal to David Thewlis' in Naked. Will update this thread as i make my way through more of the movies. Enjoy!

Garam



Babylon 1980



from the DVD liner notes...

QuoteFranco Rosso and Martin Stellman wrote the original draft of Babylon for the BBC Play for Today series. It was never used. They decided to turn it into a feature film and waited five years for the cameras to turn. That they did, finally, was due to their own persistance and the perception of Mamoun Hassan of  the N.F.F.C. [National Film Finance Corp] and Gavrik Losey, the film's producer. As Rosso put it, "this was not an easy subject to raise film finance on. It fell into none of the obvious commercial categories and producers are notoriously myopic when it comes to evaluating the unusual. Mamoun gave us tremendous support as well as the necessary finance and then Gavrik came in and turned it into a reality". Stellman adds, "Even then it wasn't easy. We were working on a shoestring. I lived in a  bedsit in North London. Until a couple of weeks before filming we were using that as our headquarters. Much of the casting was done there. I'd look around my room and all the papers scattered everywhere and think "this is ridiculous".

Babylon was filmed entirely on locations in South London and the West End over six weeks. The production HQ were above a rambling and draughty church in Deptford. The film set was totally closed to visitors (inc. journalists) due to the film's sensitive subject matter and the fact that shooting was taking place in an area of London where there is racial tension.

The cast of actors was carefully chosen by Rosso and Stellman, who already had many contacts with the black community. "This is the first time I have actually seen black actors acting here," says Gavrik. "Too often they are just there on screen as a kind of symbol. In Babylon they carry the film."

[...]



Babylon has for many years been one of the mythic films of British cinema, something that had disappeared for so long that we wondered if we'd ever actually seen it. Its sounds, dialogue and atmospheres used to waft back to me occasionally, usually during every Notting Hill Carnival, because i'm sure that's where I first saw it, at the Gate cinema, or maybe at the old Electric on Portobello Road. Like I say, there's something dreamy about Babylon...

The film's negligible distribution and shameful lack of acknowledgement by the British mainstream on its original 1980 release condemned it to an afterlife of dodgy, scratchy prints and even dodgier VHS copies. Somehow, this added to its mystique - it felt like something prohibited, off limits, under the radar and any viewing of it was tinged with illicitness. It was probably something to do with the spliffs that would be handed round.

It was a film rooted in the national tradition of social realism, its camerawork by the great Chris Menges who had helped make Ken Loach's Kes. Menges' natural lighting made Babylon really feel like life on the London streets. This was a messy place, a city in flux and unsure of its future. Houses were falling down, corrugated fences the norm, with rough splashes of graffiti everywhere. Racism was endemic and institutional, with the National Front logo a worryingly ubiquitous daubing - i'd forgotten what a shit hole the place was until I watched Babylon again, then I realised that's precisely why they let the film disappear in the first place.

Babylon exists now, clean and tidied up, but still charmingly lo-fi, so it keeps that hazy, dream-like quality, a blur of recent history thankfully fading into the distance but now preserved for another generation.

[...]



There is a particular zest to the characters but not a whiff of sentimentality. They may charm us but they are all, to some degree, delinquent. The film's authenticity runs deep. From a marketing point of view it was sometimes troubling: the dialogue between the black characters is largely in Jamaican patois and can often be hardly understandable. The first coherent lines more than ten minutes into the film are from a black parent. This was not just a detail, it was part of the drama. The older generation wanted to fit in. These youngsters wanted to stand apart, speak their own lingo, play their own music and get into their own kind of trouble.

Babylon was invited to Cannes to participate in the Critic's Week. When the film opened in Bristol, the audience, mostly young and black, slashed the seats. The filmmakers had been prescient. The film ends with Blue singing "We can't take no more of that" as black youth put up barricades, including sound systems, against the police who use a sledge hammer to break into the dance hall looking for Blue. Amazingly, an event very much like that had taken place in St Paul's in Bristol some weeks before the screening. Life was imitating art. Exhibitors became reluctant to play the film in their cinemas. There was such a thing as being too timely. Sure enough, the race riots in Brixton erupted only a few months after its release.

Have things changed in the nearly 30 years since it was released? Yes and no. Black talent is expressing itself in all the media and can be seen on the big and small screens every night. There are many more funding sources than in my days also. In other ways, everything has gotten more complicated. In an increasingly multi-cultural society, racism has diversified. The targets are now more numerous, though the counter to racism has also strengthened.

When I backed Babylon, my Films Minister was Michael Meacher and the PM was James Callaghan. When it went into production, my Films Minister was Norman Tebbit and the PM was Mrs Thatcher. I had gone from leading a charge to organising a siege. But that's another story.