Welcome to the Cheap Seats , livre ebook

Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Silver Screen Portrayals of the British Working Class
Andrew Graves


Five Leaves Publications
www.fiveleaves.co.uk
Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Silver Screen Portrayals of the British Working Class
Andrew Graves

Published in 2019 by Five Leaves Publications
14a Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH
www.fiveleaves.co.uk
www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-910170-73-1
Copyright © Andrew Graves, 2019
Cover design by Richard Johnson
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Suffer in Silence
2: Dole Cues
3: Bombsites and Bombshells
4: Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down
5: The Other Side of the Kitchen Sink
6: All the Rest Is Propaganda…
7: What’s It All About?
8: Common as Muck
9: Poor Cows and Kestrels
10: The Criminal Class
11: Teenage Wasteland
12: Choose Life
13: Life is Bitter Sweet
14: Shane’s World
15: From Babylon to Beautiful Laundrettes
16: A Woman’s Work
17: Modern Times
Select Bibliography
Filmography
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Lisa McKenzie
If I let my imagination run away with me when I’m sat in what’s left of the old pubs, with the big heavy wooden bars, fireplaces, and stools, or if I’m having a cuppa in a café, it’s really easy to drift into black and white, and into a time when working-class people’s lives, and accents, pubs, cafés, and workplaces could be seen in the cinema. Every year I go to the Goose Fair in Nottingham, and it never leaves me that this is the place where Arthur Seaton from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning rampaged and womanised. I know that I’m connected to something deeper and more important than my present, I’m connected to the ghosts of my working-class past, and they regularly haunt me. That haunting can sometimes be unsettling but mostly it’s comforting.
The importance of a collection of working-class films, therefore, critiqued and remembered in this volume, should be obvious, so if it isn’t, let me tell you just how important it is. I was raised on these films and they are as important and as much a part of my life as chips and egg and beans were for a Wednesday night tea, which was luxury bearing in mind it was mid-week, but Friday was the night I looked forward to all week.
Friday night my mum would get dressed up, she left the house to go to the Oval pub on our estate looking like Doreen from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . The excitement for me as a child was when she came back, smelling like some other-worldly place that I desperately wanted to go to, this place had the best smell in the world, Hartnell in Love perfume and lager and lime and chips and vinegar. It hinted at other things beyond our front door, fantastic things, grown-up sparkly things. We sat together on the settee and watched the late film, eating our chips and cuddling and smiling. I was allowed to watch my mum’s glamorous grown-up films. They weren’t the Hollywood big budget musicals, they were always the British kitchen sink dramas. We watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , where my mum pointed out the Nottingham buses we used to get on to visit my auntie Annie. We laughed our heads off at Billy Liar ; I didn’t know what we were laughing at but I knew Billy was silly. At the end my mum used to have a tear in her eye, I never knew why.
We watched A Kind of Loving , and A Taste of Honey . I saw myself in those films, the children playing out on the streets, the ice cream vans, the skipping songs. I saw my family and my neighbours, I knew we were part of Britain, I knew I fitted somewhere.
When my mum had had a drink she was lovely, she cuddled me and kissed me, and squeezed me, and when the sad bits came on she squeezed my hands and said, ‘Life is hard, it’s always hard for us, but you have to hold your head up even when you are sad.’ I watched Rita Tushingham holding her head up when she was sad, I watched Dora Bryan pull her shoulders back, and I watched Lynn Perry straighten the seams on her stockings, and I learned how to be a working-class woman from my mother and those films.
British working-class films are important, more important than we can really know, they are poignant, political, sometimes subtle, as in the beautiful Kes , and sometimes not. Sometimes they are a sledgehammer hitting you around the head — Arthur Seaton falling down the stairs blind drunk in the White Horse in Radford, or the closing, harrowing scene of Cathy Come Home , that even today I can’t watch without a pain in my heart, still feeling my mum’s arms hugging me. We both feared homelessness and, worst of all, being taken away from each other. This was entirely possible, as our situation was very similar to Cathy’s.
These working-class stories are much more than stories, they connect us to our pasts, and they are important art forms for and by working-class people. They give a sense of what we are, and are our voices. They show we are part of this nation, we are valued. When working-class voices, stories and narratives are not told, or if they are only told by the middle classes, we are devalued, and class inequality and class prejudice continues. Working-class films, stories, narratives, art forms and poetry are the front line in fighting for class pride.
Read, and immerse yourself in this book, watch the films. When working-class people are disappearing from the public arena it is a political act to watch these films.

Lisa McKenzie is the author of Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain .
Introduction
Whatever You Say This Book Is, That’s What It’s Not
I suppose if it were possible for this book to have a smell, other than the normal book smell, it would be the smell of the Mars Bars my dad bought for us on the way back from the pub on a Sunday afternoon. It would be his fading Brut aftershave, pervasive Brylcreem and second-hand Mansfield bitter breath. Smell is a powerful thing, it can transport us back through time. It was on those pungent Sunday afternoons of my childhood that I first came across some of those films that I have loosely placed into the category of ‘working-class cinema’.
So, what do I mean by working-class cinema? Well, for the purposes of this book I am concentrating on feature films, not documentaries (though I will mention the odd documentary from time to time), and I am going to discuss a whole range of films which depict working-class people, families, groups or individuals. I shall examine films from the current era, the British New Wave of the early 60s and I will cast my net as far back as the silent age. Though it’s a fairly long narrative which touches upon age, status, gender and race, it’s essentially a book about people and the stories they tell via the medium of film.
I hope to capture my enthusiasm and love in sharing with you some of the delight, fascination and honest appreciation I have for these films. I will chart the rise and fall of the likes of Arthur Seaton and Billy Casper, and Combo from This is England and celebrate a side of British cinema that can be unflinching, aggressive, funny, joyous, brutal and heart-breaking. I will hopefully convince you that working-class cinema is not all about flat caps and whippets and black and white screens, that this story is a female story, a male story, a rich and colourful story encompassing culture and soul.
But be warned — this is not an academic study, nor is it a detailed historical document or a chronological guide to every single film which roughly falls into the category I have chosen to look at. This can only ever be a subjective viewpoint. There are many films which I have left out, for instance you won’t find Brassed Off or The Full Monty , Billy Elliot or a host of other films up for discussion here. Sometimes it was because of time and space, sometimes it was because of personal choice and sometimes, God help me, they just didn’t seem to fit the narrative. But I do believe the films I have included provide plenty of food for thought and allow me to examine topics like youth culture, criminality, immigration and censorship.
I hope reading this will reawaken your appetite for older classics like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , A Taste of Honey and Kes , but I also hope that I will be able to tempt you with lesser-known gems such as That Sinking Feeling , Babylon , Bronco Bullfrog and Jawbone . I will also explore the lives and work of key players, whether they be actors, writers or directors, within this unique subset of British films, looking at the likes of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Shelagh Delaney, Andrea Dunbar and, of course, Albert Finney.
It’s about the city, the rural and the run-down, it’s about the factory, the pub and the kitchen sink. It’s the grit and the glory and the kick in the teeth, it’s the wondrous, the mundane, the salt in the wounds and the sugar in the tea. It’s about the anger and the laughter, it’s about injustice, love and hope.
Enjoy.
1. Suffer in Silence
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness — not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world, there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The Great Dictator (1940)
There were only a few things guaranteed to drive me into a sulky, silent, doom-laden fit of despair when I was a child. One was the increasingly rational fear of looming all-out nuclear war, with its visions of mushroom clouds, radiation poisoning and its Threads-style battering of ugly, apocalyptic certainty. Another was having to watch my non-functional parents edge ever closer to that unspoken-of divorce that hovered on the horizon, waiting to pick the bones of our dying little family unit. But the overwhelming memory of dread I take with me from that era was supplied by the work of a recently-deceased ex-workhouse inmate from South London. His name was Charles Chaplin.
I think