 Ken Loach was born on 17 June 1936 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The son of an electrician, he attended grammar school in Nuneaton and after two years of National Service studied Law at Oxford University, where he was President of the Dramatic Society. After university he briefly pursued an acting career before turning to directing, joining Northampton Repertory Theatre as an assistant director in 1961 and then moving to the BBC as a trainee television director in 1963.
Loach's first directorial assignment was a thirty-minute drama written by Roger Smith (who worked as story editor on Loach's early Wednesday Plays and was still collaborating with him over thirty years later). In 1964 he also directed episodes of Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78), which taught Loach the difficulties of directing live television drama, and Diary Of A Young Man (BBC), which enabled him to see the possibilities film afforded to get out of the studio and onto the streets. Diary also used non-naturalistic elements, such as stills sequences cut to music and a narrational voiceover, in its attempt to achieve a new kind of narrative drama and Loach was to incorporate some of these innovations into his early Wednesday Plays.
Of the six Wednesday Plays Loach directed in 1965, Up The Junction (BBC, tx. 3/11/1965) was the most groundbreaking for its elliptical style and its inclusion of a controversial abortion sequence. That he was still experimenting at this time was evident from The End Of Arthur's Marriage (BBC, tx. 17/11/1965), an uncharacteristic musical drama from a script by Christopher Logue, but the following year saw Cathy Come Home (BBC, tx. 16/11/1966), written by Jeremy Sandford, consolidate the documentary drama approach of Up The Junction and establish Loach's reputation for social-issue drama. Cathy Come Home's exposure of homelessness as a social problem, at a time when the media was preoccupied with the hedonistic fantasy of the 'swinging sixties', aroused national concern and gave a boost to homelessness charity Shelter which, coincidentally, launched a few days later..
Loach's next Wednesday Play, In Two Minds (BBC, tx. 1/3/1967), written by David Mercer, explored the issue of schizophrenia and the ideas of the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, but for his first feature film, Poor Cow (1967), he returned to the world of Up The Junction and Cathy Come Home. With a script by Nell Dunn (who had written Up The Junction), and starring Carol White as a rather more feckless variant on her Cathy character, it was a transitional film, retaining some of the stylistic innovations and non-diegetic music of Up The Junction and Cathy Come Home while striving towards the naturalistic style that was to become Loach's trademark.
Several people were instrumental in Loach finding his style and his subject matter in the late sixties. One of these was Tony Garnett, with whom Loach worked on Up The Junction, Cathy Come Home, In Two Minds and his final two Wednesday Plays: The Golden Vision (BBC, tx. 17/4/1968) and The Big Flame (BBC, tx. 19/2/1969). It was on these television dramas that Loach developed a naturalistic style which reached its fullest expression in his second feature film, Kes (1969), which Garnett produced. Adapted by Barry Hines from his own novel, Kes told the story of Billy Casper, a working-class lad from Barnsley, alienated from school and the prospect of working in the coal mine, who finds a sense of personal achievement in learning to train and fly a kestrel. The cinematographer Chris Menges collaborated with Loach on developing a more observational style which allowed improvisation and the use of untrained actors such as David Bradley who played Billy.
Kes was a commercial and critical success but Loach's next film, Family Life (1971) a re-working of In Two Minds, held little appeal for mainstream cinema audiences and, in the face of a declining British film industry, he spent most of the '70s working in television, making a series of extraordinarily radical political dramas. The Big Flame, scripted by the Trotskyite writer Jim Allen, dramatises a fictional strike at the Liverpool docks which almost escalates into a working-class revolution. Allen also wrote The Rank and File (BBC, tx. 20/5/1971), a less daring but more realistic play built around the strike of the Pilkington glass workers.
These gritty contemporary dramas were succeeded by Days of Hope (BBC, 1975), four feature-length period dramas shot in colour, showing the politicisation of a working-class family in the period from the First World War to the General Strike of 1926, which recount historical events from an explicitly Trotskyite point of view. After a return to contemporary politics with the two-part drama The Price Of Coal (BBC, 1977), Loach was able to make his fourth feature film Black Jack (1979), a children's adventure film set in the 18th century, made by Loach and Garnett's Kestrel Films with money from the National Film Finance Corporation.
Loach began the 1980s with two films scripted by Barry Hines, The Gamekeeper (1980), made for ATV and Looks and Smiles (1981), made for Central TV (and limited cinema release). Garnett had left (temporarily) for America, and Loach admits to finding things difficult at this time, struggling to raise money for films and failing to adapt to the political changes that were taking place as Britain swung to the Right:
I think I'd lost my way a bit - and lost touch with the kind of raw energy of the things we'd done in the mid-sixties and with Kes. The films I was making weren't incisive enough. I wasn't getting the right projects and I wasn't getting the right ideas. And so that's why I tried documentaries not long after the big political change occurred in Britain.
But even with documentaries Loach ran into problems of political censorship. The four-part series about the trade unions, Questions Of Leadership, commissioned by Channel Four, was never shown; a film about the miners' strike for The South Bank Show was withheld by LWT, to be shown eventually on Channel Four; and Jim Allen's stage play about Zionism, Perdition, which Loach was going to direct, was withdrawn at the last minute by the Royal Court Theatre. One of the few films Loach did manage to get made in the '80s was Fatherland (1986), written by Trevor Griffiths and funded by Film Four International with French and German co-production money. The resulting film was more European in subject matter and less social realist in style than many of Loach's previous films and, despite Loach and Griffiths sharing the same political sympathies, wasn't entirely successful, partly because Griffiths' script was more literary and less suited to Loach's naturalistic style.
It wasn't until 1990, with the release of Hidden Agenda, a political thriller set in Northern Ireland about the British army's 'shoot-to-kill' policy, that Loach was able to make a film that regained the polemical edge of the best of his earlier work. It was written by Jim Allen, who was to script two more films for Loach in the '90s, and followed by the equally successful Riff-Raff (1991), the first of a series of films produced by Sally Hibbin's Parallax Pictures and photographed by Barry Ackroyd. In addition to Jim Allen, who wrote Raining Stones (1993) and Land and Freedom (1995), Loach was able to draw on a new generation of left-wing writers such as Bill Jesse (Riff-Raff), Rona Munro (Ladybird, Ladybird, 1994), Paul Laverty (Carla's Song, 1996, My Name Is Joe, 1998, Bread and Roses, 2000, and Sweet Sixteen, 2002) and Rob Dawber (The Navigators, 2001), to regain his sense of purpose and achieve a remarkable renaissance in his career.
A new element which came into Loach's work in the '90s was an increased use of humour. This was partly a result of working with new collaborators such as Bill Jesse and Paul Laverty who brought a new sensibility, tempering the earnest didacticism of some of Loach's earlier films. Additionally, while some of the '90s films veered towards social realism (Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, The Navigators), others mixed social realism with melodrama (Ladybird, Ladybird, Carla's Song, My Name Is Joe), adding an extra enriching dimension to the films. Some critics, however, noting the presence of a downward spiral towards pessimism and defeat in Loach's films, have identified this as a persistent and fundamental problem in his work which is exacerbated by the adoption of a naturalistic style. When so many of his films end on a bleak, despairing note, no matter how 'realistic' this may be, the audience is left with little prospect of positive change, no manifesto for how things might be different.
On the other hand, one can but admire Loach for relentlessly sticking to his task, repeatedly championing the underdog by revealing the hardships and struggles of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is no accident that his best work has been produced at times of supposed affluence, in the mid '60s and the '90s, when he has often been a lone voice, bravely and resolutely standing up for the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. Few directors have been as consistent in their themes and their filmic style, or as principled in their politics, as Loach has in a career spanning five decades. Without doubt he is Britain's foremost political filmmaker.
Bibliography
Fuller, Graham (ed), Loach On Loach (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)
Hill, John, 'Every Fuckin' Choice Stinks', Sight and Sound, Nov. 1998, pp. 18-21
Kerr, Paul, 'The Complete Ken Loach', Stills, May/June 1986, pp. 144-8
Leigh, Jacob, The Cinema Of Ken Loach (London: Wallflower, 2002)
McKnight, George (ed), Agent Of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997)
Lez Cooke, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors
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