In the light of Mike Leigh's later status as an internationally successful
filmmaker, it is surprising to reflect that, after his first feature Bleak
Moments (1971), he did not get the chance to make another film for the cinema
for 17 years. Fortunately, he was able to hone his skills by working in
television during that time, in common with other directors such as Ken Loach
and Stephen Frears.
Leigh's TV features include several classics of the medium, and show him
developing many of the preoccupations and techniques that would characterise his
later films. In two of the earliest, he returned to his native north-west
England: 'Hard Labour' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 12/3/1973) is a character study
of a middle-aged Salford housewife, and 'The Kiss of Death' (Play for Today, BBC,
tx. 11/1/1977) shows the faltering attempts at romance of a young undertaker's
apprentice in Oldham.
Mostly, however, the TV films, like the later work, focus on the suburban
south. Leigh's ability to create chillingly convincing middle-class monsters
emerged in 'Nuts in May' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 13/1/1976), with the
self-righteous couple Keith and Candice-Marie Pratt, and again in 'Abigail's
Party' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 1/11/1977), a straightforward studio-based
adaptation of Leigh's theatre play of the same year, in which the overbearing
hostess Beverly presides tyrannically over an ill-fated cocktail party.
'Abigail's Party' was strenuously attacked in a review by Dennis Potter after
its first transmission. He accused Leigh of sneering at lower-middle-class
tastes and lifestyles although, viewed objectively, the play looks more like a
lamentation of the spiritual poverty of received values. Leigh does not suggest
that there is anything inherently wrong with social aspirations, only with
losing sight of what one is aspiring to, and why.
He certainly seems to have slightly more sympathy for the domestically
trapped Beverly than for 'Nuts in May''s Keith, who is a pompous, domineering
control freak. Eventually, during the course of a camping holiday in Dorset, the
control freak loses control of himself during a violent argument, and the effect
is devastating, reducing Keith to tears and making him suddenly seem rather
pathetic and vulnerable. Like Beverly and her fellow party-goers, he is a fully
rounded and thoroughly credible character - which is precisely what makes him,
and them, so appalling. Two-dimensional caricatures would be much easier to
ignore, and to forget.
This ability to understand, and even care about, characters at the same time
as satirising them was less in evidence in Who's Who (Play for Today, BBC, tx.
5/2/1979), set in and around a firm of London stockbrokers. Perhaps it is
Leigh's lack of sympathy for the protagonists that makes this ultimately a
rather episodic work that never quite coalesces. It nevertheless offered a
memorable addition to Leigh's gallery of comic creations in Alan Dixon, a
Pooterish middle-aged clerk who has an obsession with the activities of the
British royalty and aristocracy.
Leigh's skilful orchestration of character and narrative was confidently
reasserted in 'Grown-Ups' (Playhouse, BBC, tx. 28/11/1980). The story of a young
couple living in Canterbury and their family, friends and neighbours, the film
builds with perfect logic towards a painfully funny set piece in which five of
the six principal characters are piled in an undignified scramble on a
staircase. Perhaps for the first time in Leigh's work, but certainly not the
last, we are confronted with a sequence of escalating comic chaos that leaves us
unsure whether to laugh or to cry.
'Home Sweet Home' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 16/3/1982) was more melancholy in
tone, but equally well constructed. Revolving around the activities of three
postmen and their families, the film is a study of failed communication and
loneliness, and demonstrates Leigh's growing ability to deal with big themes and
emotions through a depiction of ordinary lives that is honest enough to be both
funny and sad.
The social conscience that has underpinned much of Leigh's best work came to
the fore in Meantime (tx. 1/12/1983) and Four Days in July (BBC, tx. 29/1/1985).
Meantime was made by Central Television for Channel Four, making it the only one
of Leigh's TV features not to be produced by the BBC. It explores the growing
bond between two brothers in their early twenties, who live with their parents
in a tower block in London's East End, and provides something close to a
definitive portrayal of a large section of Britain four years into Margaret
Thatcher's premiership, capturing the high unemployment and disaffection of the
period, especially among the young urban population.
Four Days in July also approached a specific social and political situation
from a familial perspective. A series of conversation pieces set in the Falls
Road area of Belfast, the film leads up to the near-simultaneous birth of two
babies. One of the mothers is a Catholic, the other the wife of a soldier in the
Ulster Defence Regiment. A recurring theme of Leigh's work - of when to have
children, how to bring them up, or whether to have them at all - is explored
with particular poignancy against this troubled background.
Leigh has also made some shorter TV pieces. In 1975 he wrote and directed
five films lasting five minutes each, which were intended to be the first in an
ongoing series. However, the BBC chose not to continue the project, and those
that were made were never broadcast until a 1982 season of Leigh's work. The
30-minute plays The Permissive Society (tx. 10/4/1975) and Knock for Knock
(tx. 21/11/1976) were both studio productions for BBC Birmingham, the second
of which was subsequently wiped.
Leigh finally returned to the cinema thanks to a change in Channel Four
policy, whereby work produced under the broadcaster's Film on Four banner would
be made on 35mm so as to make possible a cinema release prior to TV
transmission. By that time Leigh had created a formidable body of TV work, which
had frequently attracted extremely impressive viewing figures. Grown-Ups was
watched by 4.5 million, 'Nuts in May' by 8.5 million, and the third broadcast of
'Abigail's Party' - during an ITV strike - by a phenomenal 16 million. His
reputation in Britain had been firmly established, and his style of narrative
and characterisation was embedded in the national
consciousness.
Tony Whitehead
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