Billy’s life is defined by the relentless disapproval of every adult he is forced to share air with. His every idea and blunt utterance is insulted and dismissed by Mother, teachers, the bloke who owns the shop from which Billy does his paper round, and, especially his grown-up big brother Jud (Fletcher), a contemptuous mutton-chopped thug who works down the local coal mine and with whom Billy is forced to share a bed. Jud seems satisfied enough with his birds, beer and mod suits, but his major aim in life is ensuring that no one around him is happy. Especially Billy.
But Billy is a tough little shit. He has to be. And somewhere beneath the hard, mouthy shell this tiny boy has to shield himself with in order to survive, is a poetic soul. His saving grace is the surrounding Yorkshire countryside (we know this because fluttery flute music plays every time we see it), and the specific saving grace for Billy is his fascination for the birds of prey that swoop around the moors. All of the uplifting moments of this movie are based around a scruffy urchin training a kestrel he names Kes to swoop, dive and return on command. All shot on shaky camera, in a mucky, grainy colour, backed by fluttery flute music. It should be the dullest thing on Earth. It is, in fact, painfully beautiful. But context is all, and the context is the contrast between the entirely-in-the-moment pleasure of Billy’s outdoor life, and the ugly hopelessness of home and school.
Finally, amidst Billy’s daily indignities, one teacher at school, Mr Farthing (Welland), spots Billy’s potential and encourages his birdy enthusiasms. But Mr Farthing is no match for Jud, and Kes ends with an inevitable tragedy that has made generations of viewers weep angry tears for the small, pale boy who exists only to have his dreams choked and slung in a dustbin.
A scene in a public library, as Billy tries to borrow a book about falconry, is played for gentle laughs, but says huge things about the urgency of children and how a world silently conspires to keep the underclass from civilisation. Billy needs the book now, because he’s excited now, and because he’s a child, and because gratification deferred is no gratification at all. He can’t take a book out because he’s not a member. He can’t become a member without a parent’s signature. His dad has left the family home and his mother’s at work. And, even though we haven’t met Mum yet, we’ve seen enough of Big Brother to know that she isn’t going to be encouraging her child’s interests in anything. Blocked from access to useful and inspiring education by bureaucracy and adult lack of interest, Billy does the only thing a determined autodidact can do. He goes to a shop and steals the book. His immediate reward at home is not concern at his criminality, but monstrous Jud mocking his attempts to better himself. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the working class.
But Billy’s Mam – played by Lynne Perrie, who later went on to a great career as Coronation Street’s Ivy Tilsey and a proto-Kerry Katona celebrity fuck-up – is actually a decent, articulate woman who means well. In the scene in the local working-men’s club, where a band of greasy pre-hippy throwbacks play curdled Merseybeat versions of the hits of the day and a gurning comic sings a smutty song about a big marrow, Mrs Casper, in conversation with friends, gives us a handy summing-up of young Billy’s situation: ‘Perhaps if he had been brought up in a different environment, and had a better education, he would have made more than he has done.’ Billy, at the age of 15, has been written off by the only person who loves him. The film’s major theme, the self-assembled traps of the working class, is punched home when we cut immediately to handsome but dunder-headed Jud, a man facing a life working in a hole (well . . . until Thatcher came along, at least), whose only leisure activity is going to the same club with the same people and shagging the same girls twice a week, announcing proudly, to his mates, to us: ‘I’m happy as I am. I doubt if I could be any happier.’
The schizophrenic way that British society looks at its working class is always fascinating to observe. On the one hand, the middle class label us ‘chavs’, characterise us as ASBO-bearing, brat-breeding slags and scallies and spend most of their lives and money ensuring that little Josh and Jocasta don’t have their childhoods polluted by our foul odours by moving as far away from where we live as is possible on such a tiny island. On the other, they glorify us, stealing our culture and worshipping at the altar of our authenticity, trying to emulate our vernacular to look cool and forever apologising for not having our gruelling set of childhood ‘we had it tough’ tales, which, of course, we exaggerate completely in order to keep the suckers entertained and fearful.
So our current government’s recent revival of the phrase ‘social mobility’ is interesting. Kes is a vivid reminder of a time, not so long ago, when the British working class truly knew their place, and happily stayed right there. And while it’s difficult to judge whether things changed because of or in spite of the likes of Thatcher and Blair, they have changed, and for the better. My mother was pushed into a sweatshop at the age of 15. Her mother was born into service and her male peers were wiped out in a war fought for the empires of the ruling classes. Now my son gets to choose what he wants to do, within the boundaries of profit-driven capitalism, of course, and has already travelled, worked, lazed around, been to university and seen and done things my mother could only have dreamt of. At his age now, she was a single mother faced with a future of factory work and cleaning jobs to keep us alive. Watching Kes reminds me how much better life is for my tribe than it used to be, which is an important wake-up call when you live in a country whose default position is whinging.
There was never anything that glorious about the traditional British working class. Most of them were exactly like Jud. That’s why so many of us got socially mobile and are truly fucking relieved to have escaped.
Digress, digress, digress. Where were we? Of course . . . the Brian Glover football scene. Legend.
Routinely cited as the gDigress, digress, digress. Where were we? Of course . . . the Brian Glover football scene. Legend.reatest piece of football-related cinema ever filmed – admittedly, a winner in a field of one – this ten minutes of magic is essentially a tragicomic farce two-hander between Bradley and character actor/screen villain/professional wrestler Brian Glover. Glover plays Mr Sugden, a school PE teacher who uses football lessons as an excuse to play out his pathetic fantasies of being a star professional footballer. Yorkshire viewers will immediately note he’s a wrong ’un because Sugden pretends he plays for Manchester United, a club so hated by fans of nearby Leeds United that they still regularly taunt Man. U fans at games by spreading their arms and making a noise like a plane crashing, in reference to the Munich Air Disaster of 1958 in which the majority of Manchester United’s excellent young ‘Busby Babes’ team died on a German runway while returning from a European Cup match.
One of the survivors of Munich was Bobby Charlton and, in the year after Charlton had captained a new Man. U side to become the first English team to win the European Cup, that is who Sugden decides he really is. The resulting scene is a perfect amalgam of every bad memory of every humiliating games lesson that every Englishman has ever endured, as small boys are trampled into freezing mud by the kind of egomaniacal bully that always seems to choose a career in physical education.
The comic contrast is provided by Bradley’s Billy, encased in giant shorts that reach up to his armpits, legs and arms like icy toothpicks. Billy, to the general derision of the other boys, is stuck in the giant goal because he’s weedy and crap and, while Sugden indulges his fantasy up-field, refereeing the game so he can’t help but win, our hero occupies himself by swinging on the crossbar like a plucked monkey and diving dramatically away from any ball that goes near him.
Part of the reason why the scene is so memorable, apart from its surgically accurate depiction of what passes for English sporting education and the lifelong humiliation men never quite recover from when kids and teachers pick teams and they find themselves picked last (actually, Billy is picked second-last; there’s a fat kid – there’s always a fat kid), is that Glover, Bradley and the real pupils of St H
elen’s school are enjoying themselves so much that they keep having to stop themselves giggling. Loach hits home the joke by using the old theme from BBC sport show Grandstand to introduce the hilarious Glover, and flashing score updates (‘Manchester United 0: Spurs 1’) onscreen. For reasons unknown, Loach never came close to being so funny again.
Sugden’s Manchester United, incidentally, don’t win. This man is such a loser he can’t even fix a game of schoolboy football. Still, the job has its perks. He can still take it out on tiny Casper, slapping him around in the dressing-room, forcing him to take a cold shower as a form of naked humiliation. We’re not laughing any more.
And as a PS, in regards to the key theme of the discouragement of working-class potential, Sugden is entirely uninterested in the gymnastic talent Billy shows off while swinging on the crossbar and climbing out of the shower.
The black comedy hits its high and low point in a scene where an angelic pupil heads to the headmaster’s office with a message from a teacher and finds himself getting caned because the head, like every adult, feels children only exist to be ignored or beaten. Besides, he’s busy ranting about the wonderful estate that’s replaced the slums, and how old pupils stop him in the street and laugh with him about ‘the thrashings I gave them’, and how children don’t deserve the marvellous things his generation have given to them. It’s dated stuff, especially since Monty Python took the piss out of it on their ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch. But I was nowhere near Yorkshire as a nipper, and old cunts really did talk drivel like this to me, so I figure they did to everyone else in England.
It’s an extraordinary scene; the head’s fury that young people can now afford cars, the hysterical, silent laughter of the boys when he turns his back, the bewildering logic of a man beating children while admitting that it doesn’t make those children behave as he wants. ‘You are the generation who don’t listen!’ he rages, while refusing to listen to the protests of our angelic message-bringer. And the caning, when it comes, is obviously real, and the angelic boy’s shocked reaction is genuinely upsetting, and still makes me angry about all the violent assaults I watched supposedly responsible public servants hand out to defenceless kids at my London junior school.
Kes is about the imminent death of traditional working-class culture. And while I understand people looking in horror at town centres dominated by shopping malls and working-class kids all glued to separate mobile phones and far more obsessed with celebrity gossip than organised labour and community . . . I suspect those people were those lucky enough to never live in a lousy estate and go to a poor person’s school, or be around members of your ‘community’ whose favourite topic was how you’d never amount to anything, so fuck off to the nearest manual labour and be grateful. There are few things more beautiful in cinema than Billy Casper’s face as he blithely ignores everything the careers officer says about his inevitable future down t’pit. He’s a hero; a natural refusenik with have a hobby. He tames things that can’t be tamed. And we know it’s a missed opportunity, even if the essentially decent careers officer probably can’t produce a bird-trainer job out of his back pocket. No adult has helped Billy before. Why should this one?
It’s no surprise when Jud kills Kes. The man is a bringer of misery, a human dementor whose only real pleasure in life is making sure others get no more out of life than him, a symbol of what Hines and Loach appear to think about the sadistic and proudly ignorant bottom-feeder male. But it is a shock when the film just ends with Billy burying the bird. No punchline. No coda. No hope. No future.
Bradley’s performance remains one of the most singular and believable in movies. But an overdue shout-out needs to go to Freddie Fletcher as Jud. It’s a thankless role – most movie villains are at least given some kind of devilish charm – yet Fletcher nails it with memorable power. His dead eyes and brutal slang capture the essence of the soul-less bully, giving Kes its very own Bill Sikes. He went on to a good bit-part career in British TV, but, on this evidence, deserved more.
For Ken Loach, Kes was the film that launched a career as the directorial byword for socially concerned cinematic authenticity that lasts to this day. But no Loach movie since has contained either the life or the truth of Kes, which captures a shameful side of Englishness with great energy, humour and anger. Nevertheless, it’s telling that the only great recent British teen film is Fish Tank (see here), a film for which the label ‘Loachian’ could have been invented. I’m sure no one is more surprised than Loach that the style he forged has become – courtesy of Shane Meadows, Lynne Ramsey and Fish Tank’s Andrea Arnold – the only kind of film Britain’s any good at making any more.
This Is England ain’t no Kes, though.
1970s
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
1971
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, Patrick Magee, Anthony Sharp
Dir.: Stanley Kubrick
Plot: Horrorshow droogie tolchocks society in the gulliver.
Key line: ‘Yarbles!’
A Clockwork Orange was and remains the most controversial teen movie of all time. Famously, it prompted such hysteria about incidents of copycat violence that its director, Stanley Kubrick, in fear of both legal action and death threats, effectively banned his own film from being shown until his death in 1999. It’s ‘Nadsat’ language, invented by the highly original novelist Anthony Burgess, named bands (including Heaven 17 and Moloko) and introduced the words ‘droog’ (friend/gang member), ‘horrorshow’ (great), ‘yarbles’ (testicles) and ‘ultra-violence’ (you get that one) to the English language. And when any band or arty type wants to nick an image resonant of teen gang violence, they will break out the bowler hats, white boiler suits, boots, braces and mascara around one eye sported by chief protagonist Alex (McDowell) and his nasty posse of droogs.
So it remains difficult to cut through ACO’s notoriety and influence and see it purely as a movie. To talk about it as something that gives pleasure immediately implies that you are the kind of person who thinks that, say, raping a woman while crooning ‘Singing In The Rain’ is a bit of a laugh, and also quite cool and rebellious. But there are great scenes in A Clockwork Orange that are not sick.
My favourite bit of ACO takes place in a futuristic record shop: an endlessly spiralling phantasmagoria of mirrors and multi-coloured neon chart rundowns, containing ’70s glam-rock kids who all nicely set off Alex’s Edwardian frock-coat. One day I will be rich, and I will open this record shop, even if you soul-less bastards do still insist on load-sharing your MPFrees off your crappy laptops, and I will prance proudly around it, in a purple Edwardian frock-coat/yellow Harry Hill shirt ensemble, making myself poor but happy, surrounded by obscure pre-punk electronic vinyl at exorbitant prices. Sigh. And one day, an American girl with an extravagant mullet will wander in sucking on an ice lolly and say to her friend, ‘What you getting, Bratty? Goggly Gogol? Johnny Zhivago? The Heaven 17?’ And I will die, right there and then, of excessive wish-fulfilment. See? It’s not all gratuitous violence and wild over-acting.
I’m not going to take up too much space with outlining the plot here. It’s very famous, you can Google the detail. In a dystopian future England that looks like the 1970s viewed through a lava-lamp, a schoolboy thug called Alex and his three friends go out every night, drink milk laced with drugs and commit violent crime. Alex murders a woman and is caught and imprisoned when betrayed by his droogs. After pretending to be a model prisoner for a couple of years, he is thought the perfect guinea-pig for a law-and-order government’s new crime prevention idea, the LudovicoTechnique. This involves forcing the unrepentant teen psycho to watch films of the planet’s vilest horrors while pumping him full of nausea-inducing drugs and playing him Beethoven. Now ‘cured’ – that is, unable even to contemplate sex or violence without being physically disabled – Alex is released from prison unable to protect himself from a world out to get him. When he attempts suicide, the press backlash against the government forces them to reverse the treatment.
In Burgess’s original version of the novel, Alex goes on to grow up and realise the error of his ways. The American publishers insisted on omitting this final chapter, and it’s this shorter, bleaker version that Kubrick’s screenplay is based on. The nihilist satire he intended to shoot had absolutely no place for learning and growing.
Whatever you may think of the content of Kubrick’s films, ACO proves that the England-based American was the King Of Composition. Almost every damn shot of his career looks like a 3-D painting with almost fathomless depth. And perhaps the biggest problem with this movie is that it made terrible things look too good.
Let’s take, for example, the cool shapes the thugs throw – forget all this stuff about the guys in suits walking in slo-mo in Reservoir Dogs and how its choreographed cool is a tribute to film noir or some obscure Japanese B-movie. It’s A Clockwork Orange. Except Tarantino can only make cool-looking guys in cool suits look cool. Kubrick made three ugly blokes (and McDowell) in white boiler suits, bovver boots, bowler hats and grotesque off-white codpieces look iconic while walking through some municipal hell-hole. It’s image-making on some next level shit, Cuz.
So does it glorify violence? Ha. HAHAHA!!! . . . of course it bloody does! The couple whose house the droogs invade are so ra-ra posh, particularly when contrasted with McDowell’s salt-of-the-earth northern vowels, that we are invited to approve of the rape as a kind of class war gesture. When the husband, a left-wing writer called Mr Alexander, is re-introduced later in the film he is a gibbering lunatic (with what seems to be a muscle-bound gay lover) that no viewer could have any sympathy for. When Alex assaults the couple while performing a comic rendition of ‘Singing In The Rain’, it is evil, evil comedy. Why else would Kubrick make the victims scream in time to the song if not to make us laugh, in exactly the same way we laugh at Tom & Jerry (or Itchy & Scratchy)? This is brutal violence as comic entertainment, pure and simple. If it’s meant to make us confront our love of violence as movie-goers . . . well, yes, I suppose. But I don’t think Sam Peckinpah’s characters being blown away in slow motion carries this film’s sadistic enjoyment of humiliation.
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