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No modern viewer of Tomorrow's Merseysiders can avoid watching it with irony.
The film's apprehensive but optimistic prognosis for the children of Liverpool
and its environs is now haunted by the bleak economic fate which would later
descend on them.
This may seem an overly grave response to a little-known 16mm short designed
to promote the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo newspapers. True, one of the film's
fascinations is its breezy sketch of 1970s regional journalism, driven by
rattling typewriters, ringing cord-telephones, and staff segregated by class and
gender (male reporters, female receptionists, male printers). But its
sponsorship is in the tradition of enlightened patronage, the funder's image
boosted by association with social responsibility.
Early on, it's stated that the papers reach as far as North Wales and
Cheshire but the emphasis is on Liverpool. The film's title derives from a
conversation between the editor and a journalist working on a story about the
changing cityscape. They refer to the hordes of scousers migrating to new
overspill towns but wonder about the abandoned slums inside the City's
boundaries. Director Eric Marquis cuts to images of burning rubble.
Tomorrow's Merseysiders is one of Marquis's lower-key efforts, avoiding both
the swagger of some of his more stylised promotional work and the more graphic
imagery of his films for sponsors like the pharmaceutical industry and the
Metropolitan Police. Yet he still fashions what could have been a bland
advertisement into an inconspicuously artful, mildly socially conscious piece of
filmmaking. Marquis was a talented member of an unjustly neglected generation of
documentary-makers that excelled at the applied art of industrial filmmaking -
to the increasing indifference of viewers turning their attention to television
documentary. Like several 1970s films produced for non-theatrical screening,
Tomorrow's Merseysiders blends techniques from both disciplines (perhaps
encouraged by its journalistic theme). Fly-on-the-wall scenes like the editorial
conference lend a televisual feel; the film's artistic if unoriginal design
(intercutting the story of the Post and Echo's production with vignettes of
local life) bestows a cinematic quality. Across the film, associations and
contrasts, sometimes subliminal, are built up by careful use of picture and
sound. Walker Art Gallery paintings recall Toxteth graffiti. A Punch-and-Judy
show echoes youthful vandalism. A youthful choir and orchestra counterpoint the
Post and Echo's clattering printing presses. Aerial landscapes anchor the
several montages of the fresh faces of children - tomorrow's Merseysiders, the
adults of the 1980s and 1990s.
Patrick Russell *This film is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951-1977'.
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Complete film (20:03)
