I own the copyright to the following idea for the next internationally successful British movie: Our hero - let's call him Len - having been wounded in the Falklands War is forced to return home to his beloved but drab and impoverished Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands (the location doesn't matter so long as it isn't London or the South-East and as long as the dialect is incomprehensible to anyone not up on that screen), where unemployment is high and opportunities to earn honest money low; where Punks, drug peddlers, gangsters, and a generous variety of hooligans are the many, while decent God-fearing folk the few. When Len is awarded a medal for bravery, he is forced to travel to London (Len is always being forced to do things) to receive it. Observing with disgust the smooth-faced men who have done well out of the Thatcher revolution, enjoying their champagne and smoked salmon sandwich breakfasts in the City, he returns and opens a hamburger stall where the house specialty is (yes, you guessed it) Falklander and chips. When his stall is burned down for a third time by vandals, Len gives up and goes on the dole. By now, the miners' strike of 1984-1985 is well under way. Len is fairly neutral about it all until he hears Mrs. Thatcher's famous "enemies within" speech, which infuriates him to such an extent that he decides to become a political journalist.
With ever greater numbers of newspapers going over to electronic typesetting, Len decides that it's time to start up a leftist newspaper dealing exclusively with the impoverishment and exploitation of the North (or wherever it is that we are going to locate this film). Len, being a good working-class lad, naturally expects enthusiastic cooperation from the trade unions in this enterprise. They, however, are only prepared to work the "new" (it was twenty years ago) technology provided traditional manning levels are maintained and that the unions have the say in editorial questions and appointments. Heartbroken, Len is reluctantly forced to hire nonunion labor. When the owners of the rival regional papers hear about this (incidentally, they are made up from members of the traditional, landed gentry of Britain), they increase the pay of their employees, slash advertising rates, start up a leftist paper of their own, buy out all the typesetting firms in the region, and "fix" the distributors. Len's dream comes to an end, and he returns to the dole. The End.
Highs and Lows
Everything that we associate with British movies in recent years is here: the epic version of the highs and the lows of modern British society, as in Jubilee (1978), Memoirs of a Survivor (1981), and The Ploughman's Lunch (1983); a picture of Britain being torn apart by class hatred, as in Blood Red Roses (1986), Letter to Brezhnev (1986), Rude Boy (1980), Babylon (1980), and Sid and Nancy (1986); but - and here is a new twist - the expression of a fear that the threat to the prosperity of the working class comes from the working class itself, as in Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982), in which the enthusiastic advocate of revolution in If (1968) now portrays Britain being driven into the ground by ruthless and inhuman trade unions; an awareness, even a certain amount of enthusiasm, of the entrepreneurial culture that is slowly coming into existence in Britain tempered with considerable doubts as to the possibility of its ultimate triumph and with even greater doubts about its moral basis, as in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), in which the drive to get the business started comes not from the native British but from the Pakistanis living here and where the
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