Ken Loach and Christopher Eccleston take trips down memory lane
Angry, Sexy and Working Class
Radio 2
Blackpool: the Greatest Show Town
Radio 3
If you're going to make a documentary about working-class heroes, there's probably no better way to set things rolling than with the gruff tones of Arthur Seaton, the hard-drinking rebel played by Albert Finney in the 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In a voice that seethes with frustration and resentment, Seaton counts off the bicycle parts he makes on his lathe at the Raleigh factory in Nottingham: "Nine hundred and fifty-four, nine hundred and fifty-bloody-five . . . I'll have a fag in a bit, no use working every minute God sends . . . Don't let the bastards grind you down, that's one thing I've learned." Nearly five decades on, these words still strike a chord with anyone who has ever been at the sharp end of wage slavery (but let me assure readers that there are no such sentiments among those of us toiling at the New Statesman lathe).
Back in the 1960s, though, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, based on the novel by Alan Sillitoe, formed part of a revolutionary movement in cinema that brought uncompromising tales of working-class life to mainstream audiences. In Radio 2's Angry, Sexy and Working Class, Christopher Eccleston (he of the earnestly northern voice and flared nostrils) pays homage to the films that became known as the British new wave. Part one (22 June, 7pm) traced the movement's origins to a group of directors that was determined to "celebrate everyday life", inspired by the plays and novels of writers such as John Osborne and Sillitoe.
Eccleston acutely evoked the stifling cultural atmosphere of the period, where regional accents were absent from stage and screen - except for comic effect - and British film was dominated by the sentimental, "family"-oriented output of the Rank Organisation. But, this being radio and all, the programme felt rather limp because you couldn't see clips of the films in question. Angry, Sexy and Working Class was neither angry nor sexy. All the same, to his credit, Eccleston did a good enough job of outlining the social shifts that began to take place in Britain during the 1950s, as a generation developed aspirations beyond those of their parents. And every now and then, there were flashes of personality that gave you a sense of what had made the original films so great.
Best of all was an elderly Finney recalling how people's reactions to him changed after the release of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: "A lot of people . . . felt that I was very good at drinking the pints of ale myself, and that I had obviously slept with my friends' wives, which isn't true . . . well, certainly not the first part."
The "kitchen-sink" techniques of British new-wave films were taken up by later directors such as Ken Loach, whose name has become synonymous with a kind of dour social realism. So it was interesting to see that his radio debut had a distinctly dreamlike quality to it. Blackpool: the Greatest Show Town (23 June, 8.45pm, Radio 3) looked back at the resort Loach visited as a child in the 1940s. With little in the way of narration, a string of unnamed interviewees recalled their experiences of living and working in 1940s Blackpool - which in those days was a hedonist's paradise that drew up to 20 million visitors a year; the stories were interspersed with clips of contemporary songs and comedy routines.
At first the overall effect was disorientating (a lot of "ees" and "aahs" and "bah gums" and not much else), but as the programme progressed, vivid images suddenly emerged from the haze: thousands of visitors, equipped with buckets and spades, moving "like an army" from their boarding houses to the sands and back again in time for tea; or the man who remembered getting laughed at by the girls for wearing a pair of knitted swimming trunks.
Listening to the programme was like being allowed to rifle unhindered through someone's memory, cluttered and incomplete as it was. The world Loach described has long since vanished, but these fleeting glimpses created a kind of intimacy that radio so often fails to deliver.
Andrew Billen is away
Don't miss . . .
Peter Blake retrospective
Three anniversaries have brought this retrospective to Liverpool: the city's 800th birthday, 40 years since the release of Blake's artwork for Sgt Pepper and 75 years for the artist himself. Blake is not a native Liverpudlian (he was born in Kent) but, thanks to the Beatles album, he is indelibly linked with the city. This exhibition showcases his career in painting, from the early pop art to the 2003-2005 series Marcel
Duchamp's World Tour "Peter Blake: a Retrospective" is at Tate Liverpool from 29 June. http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
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