Don’t go quietly

Philip Larkin​ claimed that sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. A better (if rhyme-busting) bet might have been 1965, when BBC One broadcast Up the Junction, a riotous group portrait of women at work in a Battersea chocolate factory and on the pull in Clapham, in its Wednesday Play slot. Mary Whitehouse, president of the recently formed National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, certainly got the memo. ‘The BBC,’ she complained in a letter to the then minister of health, Kenneth Robinson, ‘are determined to do everything in their power to present promiscuity as normal.’

Up the Junction, based on a book by Nell Dunn, was the first collaboration between Ken Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got back. By his account, a ‘huge, apoplectic, stand-up row ensued’, as much about the play’s lack of narrative structure as about its ‘controversial content’, before MacTaggart, who knew original work when he saw it, found a way to back down gracefully. For if sexual intercourse didn’t begin with Up the Junction, then something else did. A television play made to an exacting schedule to fill a slot in a series established a benchmark for the new and hugely influential style of filmmaking which has since come to be known as social realism.

Previewing Up the Junction in the Radio Times – an unlikely platform for a manifesto – Garnett characterised Battersea as an area of ‘dead-end jobs, crumbling houses, dirty streets’, its inhabitants ‘exploited, given a raw deal, or just conveniently forgotten’. The play’s purpose was to make both the place and the people that much harder to forget. ‘Whether you like it or not,’ Garnett insisted, ‘this is here, now, 1965.’ He’d budgeted for several days’ shooting on 16 mm film in locations in Clapham Junction and elsewhere, a concession to the documentary impulse almost unheard of at the time in the production of studio-bound television drama. The scene is set by a montage of brief, establishing shots. Then we’re introduced to the three leading characters, Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner), by means of a pan down from a sign for Clapham Junction station which fits them exactly to a place and time. The play’s loose, episodic structure allows for improvisation. What Loach was to call a ‘go-in-and-grab-it type of filmmaking’ follows the actors – for the most part newcomers or non-professionals – as they move through real locations among real people going about their ordinary business. Later, after Eileen and a man she’s picked up have had sex in a derelict building, there’s a further montage of a dozen or so shots – many more than mere reality-effect would require – of workmen demolishing a row of houses. Social realism could be said to revive alongside the familiar use of the term ‘circumstance’ to indicate a condition or state of affairs – the kinds of ‘raw deal’ (poverty, homelessness, addiction) which were to remain its primary topic – a much older and now obsolete meaning: the totality of immediately surrounding things.

It is customary to locate the origins of social realism in the immediately postwar era of epithets when ‘angry young men’ were seen tearing it up at work and at home, more often than not without much regard to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with plays by John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, these books inspired a New Wave British cinema which during the early 1960s seemed as though it might rival its celebrated Continental counterparts in originality and scope. Shot largely on location, New Wave films gave an unapologetic voice to people whom mainstream cinema had for the most part, in Garnett’s phrase, ‘just conveniently forgotten about’. Loach has spoken of being drawn to writers like Barstow who shared his background and many of his interests. The films of the books, he adds, ‘didn’t affect me at all’.

This disclaimer signals a change of tack. A Bildungsroman is generically obliged to filter attention to the totality of immediately surrounding things through the narrow gauge of a narrator/protagonist’s unique (though not necessarily unrepresentative) point of view. What matters is the intensity with which these figures live. Because they are all attitude, their grasp of immediately surrounding things tends to the provisional or the epiphanic. In the final pages of Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), battered rugby league player Arthur Machin makes what may or may not be his final appearance on the pitch. Knowing that for him the ‘game’ (in more than a sporting sense) is up, he looks beyond its claustrophobic mayhem at the ‘life’ not yet ‘absorbed’ into it: at ‘the tops of the buses passing the end of the ground, the lights turned on inside the upper decks, the people sitting uncommitted behind the windows’. Significantly, perhaps, from Loach’s point of view, the film version, directed by Lindsay Anderson, lacks even that degree of belated acknowledgment, having just expended most of its remaining energy on the expressionist flourishes of a deathbed scene. Realism became social in Loach’s work by taking in as much as could reasonably be expected of the life we don’t absorb, or choose to ignore, even as we remain aware of its existence.

There’s plenty of ambition on display in Up the Junction, but its occasional crystallisation into overt attitude serves less as a way to tell a story than as an object of analysis. Black women workers are prominent in the camaraderie and impromptu jive sessions which enliven the daily routine in the Battersea chocolate factory. But their presence, like that of the demolition crew, is no mere reality-effect. Garnett and Loach shrewdly reconfigure the episode in the novel in which a door-to-door salesman – ‘I’m a tallyman, the name’s Barny. Carpets, briefs, cookin’ utensils, you name it I’ve got it’ – takes the narrator on a tour of Wandsworth, Clapham and Brixton in his Austin van. In the film, Barny (George Sewell) talks over his shoulder to (or at) an unidentified invisible presence in the back of the van. ‘Once you get your foot in the door,’ he swaggers, ‘you’ve got to keep it there.’ This exposition of method soon acquires a nastier tone. In Brixton, Barny informs us, 60 per cent of his calls are to Black customers. It wouldn’t be all that long before Enoch Powell was to build his ‘rivers of blood’ speech around the story of a pensioner who, having lost a husband and two sons in the war, found herself practically the only white resident on her street.

There is, however, an outside to Barny’s burgeoning complaint, against which it can be measured. A documentary-style shot from the window of the van shows two Black women inspecting a shop window. ‘I’m like the great white hunter,’ Barny confides. ‘Down the bottom of the streets you can practically hear the tom-toms going.’ One of the women turns to stare unabashedly at the camera. But she has already been press-ganged into Barny’s colonial fantasy. ‘I’m sick of these coloureds,’ he goes on. Racism is not the understandable effect, as Powell would have his listeners believe, of a perception of the damage done to long-established communities by mass immigration. It is, rather, a project which requires for its successful completion the instituting in full of an idea of ‘race’: of the scandal of a Black face on a white street. An excoriating vignette shows Barny in full flow as he persuades a man to buy a suit – ‘I sell a lot of these suits to your sort of people’ – even though the jacket is self-evidently too small for him. Then the man’s baby starts to cry, and Barny wanders over to the cot. ‘What a lovely little picaninny,’ he oozes. Racism is Barny’s business plan. ‘I’m using me brains to the best of me ability,’ he explains. ‘It’s what the Tories call free enterprise.’

Up the Junction was the first time Garnett and Loach had worked with Carol White, the ‘Battersea Bardot’, who in 1966 was to star in the most famous Wednesday Play of them all, Cathy Come Home, broadcast to an audience of twelve million people. Up the Junction is a film about collective resilience, its mood as jaunty at its conclusion as it had been at the outset. Cathy Come Home, by contrast, based on a script by Jeremy Sandford, adapts social realism to the story of a sole protagonist engaged in a struggle for survival against apparently insuperable odds. A series of missteps and misfortunes drives Cathy, her husband, Reg (Ray Brooks), and their three children deeper and deeper into poverty, and eventually apart. Throughout, the focus remains on Cathy, who delivers intermittent commentary on the increasing desperation of their search for a place to live. Sandford felt that Cathy should be regarded as ‘blameless’. She is in fact the pure product of melodramatic convention: an innocent victimised by institutional prejudice and neglect. The play creates a context for the state of affairs in which she finds herself by developing further the techniques used in Up the Junction to absorb the totality of immediately surrounding things. When Reg suffers an accident at work, the family has to move in with his mother, whom we watch climbing the stairs to her flat while various unidentified speakers comment in voiceover on the constraints of the accommodation they’ll soon be sharing. ‘I think this is the only tenement block in Islington,’ one of them remarks, ‘where you could sit on your toilet with your door open and cook your breakfast at the same time.’ Cathy Come Home inaugurates social realism’s most enduring narrative form, the melodrama of circumstance.

By​ the late 1960s, Loach and Garnett were ready to move on from the BBC, where the liberal regime overseen by Hugh Greene was coming to an end. Loach had already made one thoroughly unsatisfactory venture into feature film with Poor Cow (1967), co-starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, the latter fresh from John Schlesinger’s grandiose Far from the Madding Crowd. He and Garnett decided to set up an independent production company, Kestrel Films, with the sole purpose of bringing to the screen Barry Hines’s as yet unpublished novel A Kestrel for a Knave, a story about the sense of purpose instilled in a much-put-upon school reject by his capture and conscientious training of a falcon. The making of Kes (1969) was, as David Forrest explains in his thoroughly informative addition to the BFI Film Classics series, at once a local and a collective achievement. Loach has testified to the similarities of experience and outlook which made working with Hines, who was born and raised in the Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common, a pleasure. They filmed at St Helen’s School in Athersley, where Hines had spent two years as head of PE, and where they found David Bradley, who plays the 15-year-old Billy Casper. ‘He was just one of the kids in the class who was the right age,’ Loach recalled. ‘The kestrel, or kestrels, actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.

Kes marked a conscious departure from the ‘go-in-and-grab-it’ style of Up the Junction. The aim now was to observe, sympathetically, at a distance, but still with a view to avoiding as far as possible any suspicion of extensive rehearsal. Loach has explained that much of his ‘directing’ consists of the creation of events off-camera to which the actors have to respond. ‘A lot of effort has to go into the circumstances in which they can work.’ It’s long been his practice to shoot wherever possible in the chronological order of events, with the actors not allowed to read ahead in the script, so that they only find out what’s going to happen as it happens. Forrest’s chapter on the making of the film concludes with some thoughtful pages on the ethical implications of this uncompromising demand for authenticity when it comes to the use of child actors. Bradley did enjoy some success as an actor in the 1970s, but to all intents and purposes his career began and ended at the age of fifteen. He is, as Forrest puts it, ‘defined entirely by the film’.

Billy Casper would not have been altogether out of place in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948). His physical meagreness identifies him from the outset as an archetypal waif. He’s about to leave school and has no prospects apart from the mine which employs his elder brother, Jud (Freddie Fletcher); there might not even be a job there, as Jud is at pains to point out, for such a ‘weedy little twat’. The story of Billy’s relentless victimisation both at school and at home amply fulfils melodrama’s requirement for pathos. Like Hines, Loach felt that he could have been more sympathetic towards Jud, who has troubles of his own that neither novel nor film ever fully admit to. Jud does assault Billy and murder the kestrel, but he’s been provoked to it by Billy spending – on fish and chips – the money Jud gave him for the purpose of placing a bet. The bet (well-judged, as it turns out) would have earned Jud a welcome week off work. It’s vital to the success of novel and film, however, that the requirement for pathos which makes a deep-dyed villain of the older brother shouldn’t seek to sift good from evil in the younger. Unlike Cathy, Billy can’t be regarded as blameless: there’s as much Artful Dodger in him as there is Oliver Twist. An early draft of the script introduces him as a leading member of a gang of schoolboy hoodlums. In the first ten minutes of the filmed version, he manages a mildly dangerous prank and a couple of acts of petty theft.

To those in authority, the impulse informing Billy’s behaviour looks a lot like sheer recalcitrance (from the Latin verb meaning to kick out backwards, as an animal might). But it isn’t that at all. We learn to recognise in his sudden accessions of energy – each a step or lunge forwards – a sort of heedlessness. The film’s achievement is to uphold a Romantic or broadly humanist faith in heedlessness’s inherent creativity, while at the same time describing from within, as the melodrama of circumstance demands, the damage done by institutional neglect. Social realism has consistently taken a greater interest in the radical flux that envelops the coming-of-age saga’s protagonist than it does in the sharp-edged ambition on display in New Wave cinema’s Bildungsroman-induced parade of fast-talking twenty-somethings. Heedlessness arises out of flux and remains for a piercingly lucid interval its primary expression.

The first classroom scene sets the tone. Mr Crossley, played by Trevor Hesketh, who had taught Bradley, is reading the register. Silence falls when he reaches the name of Fisher, who doesn’t seem to be present. ‘German Bight’, Billy interjects. When Crossley rounds on him, he explains that the joke ‘just come out. Fisher, German Bight. That’s the shipping forecast, sir. Fisher, German Bight, Cromarty. I like to hear it every night, sir. I like t’names.’ Of all the many tributes paid to the BBC’s regular late-night incantation, the most remote in provenance from Billy’s may in a sense be the most germane to it. Seamus Heaney once attributed his earliest understanding of words as ‘bearers of history and mystery’ to the ‘beautiful sprung rhythms of the old BBC shipping forecast – Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Shetland, Faroes, Finisterre’. These rhythms have stirred Billy to a visionary lunge forwards that evades Crossley’s crude jeering as easily as it does the scornful laughter of his classmates. ‘It just come out, sir,’ he reiterates.

The next day, Billy, having tried to rouse one of his mates and been told to ‘Bugger off, you little sod’ by the boy’s mother, heads out into the woods – the ‘vast and verdant’ landscape, as Forrest puts it, in which he has been accustomed to ‘seek solace’. On this occasion, however, Billy’s mood is less than bucolic. He thrashes wildly at the vegetation with a stick and hurls something into a stretch of water which is more post-industrial sump than bubbling rill. Reaching the edge of the forest, he sees a kestrel launch itself from the ruins of a farmhouse towards a telephone pole. Fascinated, he climbs a wall and starts to cross a field. We watch from his perspective as a man and his young daughter emerge from behind the building: ‘Bugger off, then,’ the man yells. ‘Dunt tha know it’s private property?’ Billy says he’s only there for a sight of the kestrels. The next shot, lasting almost a minute, is from behind the man, as Billy approaches him and a conversation develops, the two standing side by side gazing up at the nest. It’s the first time in the film that he’s been treated as an equal – as something other than a little sod – by an adult. His new acquaintance advises him that what he needs if he is to catch and train a kestrel is a book from the library. Rebuffed by the librarian (more institutional neglect), he duly lifts a copy (Dodger-style) from a second-hand bookshop. Billy will be back at the ruined farmhouse that night to seize a young bird. The solace he seeks is to be found not in nature, but in a removal of nature from nature mediated by cultural exchange, by the gathering of information.

Billy’s heedlessness receives its ultimate vindication when the English teacher, Mr Farthing (Colin Welland), invites the class to consider the difference between fact and fiction, and, after a good deal of coaxing, Billy is persuaded to talk about his experience of training Kes. His account gradually gathers momentum as he takes Farthing’s place at the front of the room, illustrating the techniques of falconry with remarkable clarity of both word (jess, swivel, leash) and gesture. We see him in close-up as he describes the mixture of fear and awe he felt as he waited for Kes to return to his gauntleted fist, ‘like lightnin’, head still, and you couldn’t hear t’wings’. The lengthy shot ends in a round of applause as Billy declares: ‘Well, that were it, sir, I’d trained her.’ By Welland’s account, the reception his story receives from the class was ‘completely unrehearsed’. ‘We were genuinely moved and that’s what comes across.’ It’s because the whole film occupies the span of Billy’s lucid interval that its downbeat ending seems less a conclusion than a pause held indefinitely.

Kes proved a hard sell. Falconry is not the most mainstream topic, while the thickness of the Yorkshire accents led Garnett himself to wonder whether the film would be understood anywhere outside Barnsley. United Artists finally agreed to back it, in a deal brokered by Tony Richardson, whose Woodfall Films had been responsible for New Wave films such as A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962). Obliged to show Kes to Eric Pleskow, a United Artists executive who happened to be in London, Garnett sat anxiously at the back of the theatre. When the lights went up, Pleskow passed him on his way out without even breaking stride. ‘“I would have preferred it in Hungarian,” he said.’ Still, Kes did eventually achieve a general release. Its critical and commercial success, in the UK at least, served to establish Loach’s reputation as a director of feature films.

A charge sometimes laid against social realism is that its politics are blithely social-democratic. It remains content with an exposure of the effects of injustice rather than its causes. This isn’t entirely fair. Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home and Kes don’t lack for analysis of structural failure. Garnett and Loach, however, seem to have felt that they needed to find new ways to press that analysis home. By the end of the 1960s, they had certainly had enough of social democracy. Their most significant doctrinal departure was The Big Flame, a Wednesday Play broadcast on 19 February 1969, from a script by the ex-miner and activist Jim Allen, who had been following with keen interest the progress of an unofficial dock strike on Merseyside. In the play’s defining scene, a militant trade unionist persuades the strike committee to pursue a ‘political’ rather than merely ‘economic’ struggle against the employers. What would happen if, instead of withdrawing their labour, the strikers were to take control of the docks and run them as a workers’ collective? Betrayal on the part of the union leadership, followed by military intervention, turns out to be the answer; but not before a ‘big flame’ – the embrace of metaphor is telling – has been lit for others to see. The organisers of the strike are convicted and sent to prison. The Big Flame makes extensive use of unidentified voiceover and descriptive montage to give due weight to the experience of the rank and file during the strike. But it is as much fable as melodrama of circumstances. The fable contains a formula for the history of the working-class aspiration to political agency under capitalism: betrayal plus martyrdom equals heroic failure.

Garnett said that he and Loach wanted The Big Flame ‘to be true, to have the texture of the world, what the world is really like’, while also admitting that it is ‘straightforward propaganda’. A decision about genre was soon to remove the fable altogether from the sorts of ‘texture’ enabled by social realism’s preference for a contemporary setting. Television, somewhat unexpectedly, made this change of emphasis possible. Days of Hope, a further collaboration with Allen, was broadcast by the BBC in September and October 1975, during a period of economic instability and the widespread politicisation of industrial relations as Conservative and Labour governments sought successively to cope with that instability through wage restraint. Its four parts chart episodes of heroic failure, from the savage treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War to the collapse of the 1926 General Strike through the involvement in them of several members of a Northern working-class family, thus providing a revolutionary counter-script to the mildly reformist ideology of successful costume dramas of the time such as The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs. The last and lengthiest of the four films lays the blame for the failure of the General Strike squarely on the betrayal of working-class militancy by the leadership of the Trades Union Congress and of the Labour and Communist Parties. This is considered propaganda, patient, bold and admirably serious, and it gave rise to widespread debate – including the ultimate accolade of a scornful rebuke from Margaret Thatcher, during her first address to the Conservative Party Conference as leader of the 0pposition, on 10 October 1975.

But there was a price to be paid. Days of Hope fights a losing battle of its own against the conventions of costume drama, which complicate any effort to reconcile the claims of propaganda with those of the texture of the world. Whether you like it or not, as Garnett probably didn’t remark to Loach, that was there, then: 1916, 1921, 1924, 1926. The first two films adopt tried-and-tested observational techniques such as the use of a mobile camera to follow movement through a physical and social space with which we gradually become familiar. But the locations have inevitably been doctored, while the box-fresh antique vehicles – limousines, cabs, buses, vans, drays, armoured cars – are a constant distraction, more toy than prop. As the fable develops, dialogue morphs into disquisition. Intent on developing a thesis, the films have less time for an accompanying hubbub of unidentified voices.

Two further historical dramas can be said to have completed Loach’s transition from the director of flagship television plays to the director of internationally funded arthouse movies with an enthusiastic if rather more scattered following: Land and Freedom (1995) and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), both produced by Rebecca O’Brien, one written by Allen, the other by Paul Laverty. These epic reconstructions of key episodes in the Spanish Civil War and the Irish War of Independence certainly succeeded in stirring political debate. Their propaganda, too, is considered. But, like Days of Hope, they are to my mind inhibited as dramas by their adherence to the Big Flame formula. It’s a formula that Loach had by now begun to articulate as a political activist. The speech he gave in Islington in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy during the 2024 general election turns precisely on the memory of heroic failure (the 1984-85 miners’ strike) as a living reproof to the serial ‘treachery’ of the Labour Party leadership (Kinnock, Hattersley, Blair, Brown, Starmer). By this reckoning, the endgame is still martyrdom: expulsion from the party worn ‘as a badge of honour, proudly’. In September last year, Loach attended a private meeting of Collective, an organisation dedicated to the establishment of a ‘new, mass-membership political party of the left’.

The activist’s disavowal of social democracy did not curtail the creative uses the filmmaker was able to find for social realism’s commitment to the texture of the world. Never happier than when steeped in dense concentrations of vernacular speech, Loach embarked at the end of the 1990s on a Scottish ‘trilogy’: My Name Is Joe (1998), Sweet Sixteen (2002) and Ae Fond Kiss … (2004), all produced by O’Brien and written by Laverty, a civil rights lawyer who had originally sent him a script based on his own experiences in Nicaragua which became Carla’s Song (1996). Loach has described My Name Is Joe as a ‘love story’ about the on-off relationship between a recovering alcoholic who coaches a football team for the unemployed and a health visitor responsible for the family of one of the players. ‘It’s quite light in some ways,’ he adds. Its more graphic scenes involve domestic violence, intravenous drug use, a relapse into alcoholism and suicide. If Loach’s ‘quite light in some ways’ makes you wonder what he might understand by ‘quite dark in some ways’, you need look no further than Sweet Sixteen. Fifteen-year-old Liam (Martin Compson) is a latter-day Billy Casper, headed for no job at all rather than one he knows he’ll hate. The heedlessness he devotes to providing for his mother on her release from prison has the not wholly unintended consequence of introducing him to the rigours of gang warfare. ‘Ye didna’ fight them because you were brave,’ his elder sister remarks tersely while (once again) cleaning his wounds. ‘You fought them because ye just didna’ care what happened to ye.’ Drawing back a little from this Clydeside abyss, Loach next embarked on a love story about the on-off relationship between an Irish-Catholic teacher and a second-generation Glaswegian Asian who has trained as an accountant but aspires to something a bit more adventurous. Written with a subtlety that doesn’t by any means shirk harshness, the film tiptoes far enough into romcom territory to avert the gloom of the Burns song which supplies its title (‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!’).

It’s​ largely thanks to Loach’s example that social realism remains a potent and versatile cultural resource for young filmmakers with something to say about working-class experience in Britain here and now. Kes, Forrest notes, has ‘carved out a space in British cinema’ for such ‘nuanced and poetic representations of the politics of childhood’ as Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999), Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), Samantha Morton’s The Unloved (2009) and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013). These are all films in which the young protagonists ‘demonstrate their otherwise unrealised capacity for love, care and skill’ through their relation to animals. In each case, I would add, it is the protagonist’s essential heedlessness – their refusal to fit in or go quietly – which lays bare the ‘politics of childhood’. If we broaden the focus sufficiently to include heedlessness not involving animals, we could add Paweł Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000), Shane Meadows’s This Is England (2006) and, more tentatively, Duane Hopkins’s Better Things (2008) and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022). Arnold’s Bird (2024), a coming-of-age saga set in the part of north Kent where she grew up, follows the Loach playbook in many respects (it was shot in the chronological order of events, on location, with a mixture of first-time and professional actors who hadn’t always been allowed to read ahead in the script). There are times when the film’s helter-skelter as-if-shot-on-a-phone aesthetic begins to feel like the ‘go-in-and-grab-it’ style responsible for Up the Junction’s similar raucous bravado. A playbook, however, is not a template. Animals proliferate in Bird. As their vivid presence infiltrates and ultimately commandeers the plot, so social yields to magic realism, hard-won observation to extracts from a bestiary.

Remarkably, Loach is still at it, in collaboration with Laverty and O’Brien, directing The Old Oak (2023) at the age of 86. The 1984 strike remains an important point of reference in a film set in a mining community in County Durham. As the heroic age of trade-union militancy recedes, however, so the emphasis of his work has shifted once again. It now places greater faith in civic than political solidarity. Different patterns shape the narrative: the warmth of the friendships between a world-weary older man and a young woman at her wits’ end in I, Daniel Blake (2016) and The Old Oak; or the miraculous materialisation of a flash mob or posse of well-wishers at the conclusions of Looking for Eric (2009) and The Old Oak – like dragon’s teeth sprung from the bare earth, but jovial and startlingly co-operative. The political deduction might be that a Collective-style mass movement will need to begin in community activism.

The recent film with the best claim to ‘appropriate size’ is Sorry We Missed You (2019), which chronicles the intolerable strain placed on a family by an uphill battle against debt. Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) is a self-employed van driver cast adrift in the gig economy; his wife, Abby (Debbie Honeywood), a care nurse run off her feet; their teenage son, Seb (newcomer Rhys Stone), a Billy Casper who seeks solace in graffiti rather than in falconry. As in Kes, Loach’s reliance on long-focus lenses serves to embed the protagonists in an unforgiving environment. The ‘texture’ of the world seeps into the film with each traffic warden appeased, each gentle soothing of the mortification brought on by incontinence or incipient dementia. The ascent of Seb and his crew to the elevated hoarding they propose to spray-paint is as heedless in its way as Billy’s scramble up a brick wall to the kestrels’ nest. Sorry We Missed You is social realism at its most unsparing. Its title acquires a sombre resonance as the members of the family count the emotional cost of the bitter disputes that have driven them apart. Ricky’s downwards spiral culminates in a savage beating. The next morning, although clearly not fit for work, he sets off in his van, while Abby and Seb try in vain to stop him. Accelerating ferociously up the street, he takes a speed bump too fast. The shot lingers just long enough to capture the van’s juddering skip into the air – a final bulletin from the totality of immediately surrounding things.