Northern Uproar / London Calling – ‘You and Your Bloody Culture!’

Class war on campus, the eternal allure of That London, Billy Liar, Gumshoe and other would-be runaways....

Northern Uproar / London Calling – ‘You and Your Bloody Culture!’

“Are you from The NORTH?” shrieked the female student in a decidedly un-northern accent after clocking my own dulcet Scouse tones. My inquisitor stressed the words ‘The North’ with chirpy cut glass disdain. “How do you write about art and stuff coming from THERE?” she laughed, delighted at the correctness of her evaluation. “Nothing has EVER come out of The NORTH…”

In the face of such specific regional bias, by rights I should have batted back with a rapid fire list of artistic geniuses from the north of England, which was where she meant. This would have gone from Mark E Smith to Vivienne Westwood, by way of Alan Bennett, the Bronte Sisters, Anthony Burgess, DH Lawrence, Shelagh Delaney, David Hockney and a million more. As it was, my mind went as blank as a northern sky, and I said nothing, left speechless by the mixture of idiocy and certainty in the statement I’d just heard.

“Nothing has EVER come out of The NORTH…”

This brief exchange took place several years ago at a National Union of Journalists meet-the-students type night hosted by Edinburgh Freelance branch, of which I am a member. Basically the branch would buy a bunch of aspiring student hacks a drink in exchange for them listening to various old lags bigging up the importance of being part of a trade union. This was despite, and in fact because of the parlous state of freelance journalism today. After that, the students went off into the night with their minds expanded in some way. Or so we hoped.

If any of those who turned up ever pursued journalism as a profession I have no idea. In terms of the state of cultural curiosity amongst the student body politic, the encounter described above was a trailer for the dumb of things to come.

I was reminded of this after reports a couple of months ago now about how the University of Edinburgh has issued guidelines to its sizeable congregation of private school educated charges not to be snobs towards their state school sired peers. This came on the back of criticism levelled by working class Scottish students that they are often looked down on by the self-styled superior set, be it for their accents, the fact that they have to work to pay rent, or simply for the fact of being at such an august institution at all without having had their education bought for them. This prompted those affected to found the Scottish Social Mobility Society in order to provide a voice – accented or otherwise – to stand up against the university’s inherent classism.

While the SSMB response is a good thing, I can’t help but wonder if any of those behind it ever watched Clique (2017-18)? Clique was a glossy TV drama set among a group of Edinburgh Uni students who become part of an elite cohort doing something or other illicit under the influence of some high flying academic guru. This is duly rumbled and exposed by an incoming commoner who also happens to be a lot smarter than them all. Think Jean Brodie’s crème de la crème with more sex, drugs and a higher body count.

Clique was written and created by Jess Brittain, who had penned episodes of Skins (2007-13), which was co-created by her dad, Brian Elsley, and her brother, Jamie Brittain. Jess Brittain studied English Literature at Edinburgh Uni, and her dad was born in Dalkeith. Before moving into telly he worked in theatre in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh filmed for Clique looks beautiful, but was annoying for a mate who lived on the street where they were filming, and was unable to park his car. This in itself was a sort of mini class war.

It’s been a few weeks now since the report on class based snobbery at Edinburgh University last made headlines. Meanwhile, I’ve just read a big article in the Guardian newspaper about how ‘working class creatives’ don’t stand a chance in the current environment. This is based on a study of arts institutions in England that found a high percentage of leadership roles were filled by those who went to private school, and/or were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. None of this is remotely surprising, though in light of what is going on at Edinburgh Uni, it would be interesting to see what the figures were in Scotland. I suspect it’s not that different.

Possibly because I’m an uneducated pleb, all this has taken its time to filter through my comprehensive schooled brain and remind me of a few things about the city I call home. I never went to Edinburgh Uni, just Queen Margaret back when it was a plain old college. Nor have I ever had any real ambitions for further education, let alone possess the required qualifications to pursue an academic future. More fool me.

I went to Anfield Comp, Liverpool 6, an all boys institution set in a 1960s built four-floor construction catering for 1200 pupils. I left with one O Level or GCE (General Certificate of Education) as was in England then, and a bunch of CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) ranging in grades from 1 to 5. CSEs were what you were put in for if your teachers didn’t think you were up to taking O Levels. My sole O Level was in English Language, taken in fourth year when our English teacher, Mr. Jones, decided to enter the entire class a year early, despite confidently expecting all but his chosen few to fail. I passed with a B, which was as much of a surprise to me as it was to Mr. Jones.

I was fourteen when I passed the English exam, and fifteen when I did my CSEs before leaving school entirely. Sixteen was the standard leaving age, but the way my birthday fell I was the youngest in my year. Like everyone else who didn’t stay on for sixth form, I was spewed out into a world of statistic massaging Youth Opportunities Programmes, office fodder training schemes and ultimately the dole. Such were the career opportunities for under-achieving and under qualified pop geeks in 1980s northern Britain.

Fast-forward a few years and for various reasons I’ve ditched my job-for-life as an office boy with the Health and Safety Executive and run away to Scotland, first to Glasgow, then Edinburgh. The North is a different thing up here. I’m from the South now. But the fresher at the NUJ meet and greet wasn’t thinking about her immediate locale, which makes her comment even worse.

People seemed different to what I was used to when I moved to Edinburgh. It was nothing I could put my finger on, although some of the people I hung out with seemed to always be talking to each other about school. I had no idea what these places called Watson’s and Fettes were, let alone St George’s or Mary Erskine’s, and was a bit baffled by the line of chat. Anfield Comp was a long time ago even then, and given my undistinguished time there, I certainly had no desire to talk about it.

Only when I’d been in Edinburgh a few years longer did the penny drop. Some of these people I knew whose alma maters were Watson’s and Fettes were fine. Some became best mates, and still are. Hell, I even knew what St George’s and Mary Erskine’s were by now.

Even today I still hear people who went to private school talk about what probably weren’t the best days of their lives, but which they wear with a badge of honour anyway. One thing I’ve learnt about some people I’ve met who went to private school in Edinburgh is that, scholarship kids aside, and despite all evidence to the contrary, they like to make out they’re not posh, . The confidence of the privileged is a curious beast.

As an incomer, I was of an age where I would inevitably cross paths with Edinburgh University students. Again, some became friends, others were arseholes, which is the way of things whatever background you’re from. Then there are the ones for whom an expensive education is no barrier to stupidity. Which brings us back to that NUJ student night.

This particular year I must have been one of the speakers, prompting this accusatory and slightly tipsy confirmation of a regional divide. As we’ve established, this doesn’t include Scotland or Edinburgh, despite my all-knowing inquisitor having just moved there from what I can only presume was in that mythical place known as ‘The South’. Perhaps she even came from ‘That London’, that far away nirvana where the streets at one time were presumed by northern refugees attempting to escape their roots to be paved with gold, only for their soft southern ambitions to be thwarted like a character from Billy Liar.

There. There’s a northerner. Right there. Billy Liar, the 1959 novel by Leeds born Daily Mirror reporter Keith Waterhouse that a year later was turned into a play that opened in That London after Waterhouse co-wrote it with his collaborator since boyhood, Willis Hall. At that time, That London’s theatre scene was being revolutionised by a generation of posh directors putting on plays about common people. Kitchen Sink, someone called it. Middle class heroes, the bloody lot of them, as Billy’s dad might have put it.

In the original production of Billy Liar, Salford born Albert Finney played Waterhouse’s northern dreamer attempting to break out of his stifling home life and make it big as a comedy scriptwriter, but who fails to get on the train to actual London.

Waterhouse and Hall’s play was directed by Lindsay Anderson, the Cheltenham College and Oxford educated champion of Free Cinema. Anderson would go on to direct Richard Harris in the big screen adaptation of Wakefield born David Storey’s novel, This Sporting Life (1963) before going on to make his masterpiece, If…(1968). If…charted a public school rebellion by an anarchic troupe led by a witheringly sardonic Malcolm McDowell as the uprising’s leader, Mick Travis. Anderson’s alma mater, Cheltenham College, was used surreptitiously as If…’s main location.

Anderson would go on to direct Yorkshire born and Liverpool raised McDowell again in what became a state of the nation trilogy. O Lucky Man! (1973) saw McDowell as a Candide like Travis inadvertently exposing the lower depths of everyday corruption and societal division while he travelled the country as a naïve coffee salesman. At one point he hitches a ride with Alan Price, former keyboardist with Newcastle group, The Animals, who punctuates scenes in Brechtian fashion with his own songs. Helen Mirren is also on board in a film that ended with a metatextual grand finale party with Price playing live.

Both If…and O Lucky Man! incidentally, were produced by Memorial Productions, the company set up by Albert Finney and Michael Medwin to pretty much keep the British film industry afloat. After appearing in Billy Liar on stage, Finney made his name playing furious factory worker Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s novel, published in 1958. Sillitoe’s short story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), had been filmed by Yorkshire born, Oxford educated Tony Richardson, with Tom Courtenay in the lead role.

Karel Reisz was a Czech émigré and a Free Cinema collaborator of Anderson, and produced This Sporting Life. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, meanwhile, went on to inspire Sheffield band the Arctic Monkeys to lift a line of dialogue from the film for the title of their debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006).

Memorial films that Finney starred in included Charlie Bubbles (1968) and Gumshoe (1971). In Charlie Bubbles, which Finney also directed, he played a successful writer returning home to Manchester, where he drives around the demolished streets in an open-topped Rolls Royce. The script is by Shelagh Delaney, the Salford sired autodidact who had a hit with her first stage play, A Taste of Honey (1958), produced by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East. A film of the play directed by Richardson was made in 1961.

Lines from Delaney’s play were adapted into song lyrics by Morrissey for the first Smiths LP. Delaney also penned The White Bus (1967), a short drama directed by Anderson. The film in part anticipated Charlie Bubbles, as a young woman played by Patricia Healey takes the train from London to Manchester, where she joins an open-top bus trip that travels around similarly bulldozed streets of Hulme and Salford.

Echoes of The White Bus could be seen sixteen years later in the Anderson directed video for ‘More, More, More’ (1983), an ebullient gospel-tinged single by Mancunian nouveau jazz troupe, Carmel. With the group led by singer Carmel McCourt, the black and white video saw them perform on the back of a lorry as it drives around town before arriving at a venue where a full brass orchestra accompanies them as the film turns to living 1980s colour.

In Gumshoe, Finney takes a trip up the M62 to play Liverpool bingo caller Eddie Ginley, whose Billy Liaresque Raymond Chandler fantasies lead him into deep trouble. Gumshoe was scripted by Liverpool born actor and writer Neville Smith, and was the debut feature of Stephen Frears, the Cambridge educated director who assisted Anderson on If…and worked with Finney on Charlie Bubbles.

Smith’s first two TV plays, The Golden Vision (1968) and After a Lifetime (1971), were directed by Ken Loach. Smith also scripted Apaches (1977), a frankly terrifying public information film directed by John Mackenzie. A later TV play by Smith, Long Distance Information (1979), set in a radio station the night Elvis Presley dies, was directed by Frears. Smith played the lead, as he had done in Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), the first of a series of six plays by Alan Bennett.

Another in the series, The Old Crowd (1978), was directed by Anderson, and caused a tabloid furore, partly due to its provocative content, but mainly due to TV viewers being able to see Anderson and the camera people he was directing in shot. I’m not sure if anyone on the production ever tried to explain Brecht to the Sun newspaper, but they should have done.

Long before all that, Smith made his big screen debut in an uncredited role as an unruly youth in Billy Liar. A retrospective of Smith’s much neglected work was shown at HOME in Manchester throughout January 2017.

Lindsay Anderson would eventually follow If…and O Lucky Man! with Britannia Hospital (1982), set in a cash strapped hospital riven with strikes and mad scientists as a royal visit looms. McDowell and Mick Travis were back, this time with a Liverpool accent, with Anderson using a very British institution as the film’s metaphorical backdrop as he had with If… and O, Lucky Man!

This time out, however, Anderson’s assault on his own culture arrived in the thick of Margaret Thatcher’s first term as prime minister and the triumphalism of the Falklands War. The film duly died enough of a death to see Anderson effectively blackballed from the British film industry old boys network after biting the hands that fed him.

Anderson’s original Billy Liar, Albert Finney, was succeeded on stage by Tom Courtenay. Hull born Courtenay would go on to play Billy in what is arguably his most celebrated incarnation in an era defining film directed by Oxford educated John Schlesinger. Waterhouse and Hall had already worked with Schlesinger, writing the screenplay for his film of Stan Barstow’s novel, A Kind of Loving (1962).

As well as Tom Courtenay, Billy Liar also starred Convent schooled Julie Christie as Liz, the free-spirited girl of Billy’s dreams who breezes through the Bradford streets that act as the fictional town of Stradhoughton. In the novel, Liz doesn’t appear until page 90. In the play she is in one scene in the third act. In both, her spirit hovers over everything that goes before.