Please note the following is adapted from my dissertation on the television play and its role in the development of the British film industry, from 2006.

1. UP THE JUNCTION (1965)

    Up The Junction was Ken Loach’s fourth Wednesday Play, following A Tap on the Shoulder (the first play to be broadcast in the Wednesday Play slot, attracting 10million viewers), Wear a Very Big Hat and Three Clear Sundays (all 1965). Up the Junction is now recognised as pioneering a new form of television drama, including, in an early form, many of the elements which would mature into Loach’s signature style.

    Based on Nell Dunn’s novel about her experiences living and working with factory girls in Clapham Junction, the play is loosely based around three such girls – Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner) – yet also includes a variety of usually anonymous characters. Their stories are overheard in pubs, in factories, on dancefloors; some of them are seen telling their stories, others are heard only as voices on the soundtrack. Their lives and stories represent a different side to London on the 1960s, almost another world to the capital found in ‘Swinging London’ films such as Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) or A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964). Up the Junction (and Loach’s next film, Cathy Come Home, 1966) highlighted the exceptions to the post-war affluence commonly associated with London in the mid 1960s (Hill, 1998: 18), and the real inequality that lay behind this idealised image (Hayward, 2004: 52).

    The issue of sex receives an ambivalent treatment in the play, for although both men and women indulge in sexual relations, they do not necessarily bring enjoyment or happiness. In one sequence just before Rube’s abortion, she is seen walking alone in a forest or park, intercut with footage of pregnant women or women with children. On the soundtrack we hear various anonymous women recounting their own experiences of sex, marriage and abortion. Many of these are unhappy or disappointing, and reveal a certain amount of naivety; one woman reflects, ‘I never got no pleasure out of it. Didn’t know I was carrying ‘til I was five months’; another muses ‘they say it’s lovely when you’re married, lying between the sheets’. The emphasis on marriage is constantly present, reflecting older, and still ingrained, social expectations. Interestingly, this freedom of sexual expression is not confined to the young women, and the presence of the older generation is strong throughout the play, both in work and leisure pursuits.

    The play was one of Loach’s first experiments with using lightweight 16mm equipment, as opposed to the heavy 35mm that had been standard until then. This allowed cameraman Tony Imi (Hayward, 2004: 55) much greater freedom in using handheld camera, which added to the documentary-feel that Junction and other early plays are now remembered for. The majority of the play was shot in just four days on locations around London, while James McTaggart, one of the producers in charge of the Wednesday Play, was away (and unable to raise objections). In order to achieve the same feel throughout the play, scenes filmed on tape in the BBC’s studio were later dubbed on to film, and cut together in post-production (Saynor, 1993: 12), much against standard BBC procedure. The end result is an innovative play that captures the zeitgeist of the time, described by Loach as

a kaleidoscope of images… a set of experiences that indicate the way [people] live and why they live that way, and that raises all sorts of questions.(Cooke, 2003: 70)

    The play’s fragmented narrative, with elements of documentary technique and montage, was unprecedented in television drama, and caused controversy in the press, who accused Loach of blurring the line between fact and fiction. Wyndham Goldie, writing in the Sunday Telegraph described this as ‘a new and dangerous trend in television drama’, arguing against the combination of drama and documentary on the grounds that ‘a doubt could be cast upon the validity of what has in fact been real’(Petley, 1997: 30-31). The theme of abortion was another contentious issue, and the play contributed to the debate surrounding the legalisation of abortion – at the time it was screened the Abortion Law Reform Bill was being discussed in Parliament (Cooke, 2003: 74) – abortion was finally legalised in 1967. Part of the play’s interventionist technique involved the inclusion on the soundtrack of an interview with Loach’s own doctor, listing statistics about illegal abortions in Britain and resultant deaths (a tactic further developed in Cathy Come Home the following year). This was also a point of contention for the press, with Philip Purser (also of the Sunday Telegraph) arguing that ‘drama deals with individuals, not statistics… it is surely an admission of failure if a play has to protest that it is based on fact’ (Petley, 1997: 31).

II:III:2. SWEET SIXTEEN (2002)

    Sweet Sixteen is the second in Loach’s Scottish ‘trilogy’ of films, which, although apparently unconnected, followed on from one another in an almost stream-of-consciousness way. Following My Name Is Joe, Loach and writer Laverty had wanted to focus on the lives of the boys on the football team that Joe coaches, as Laverty recalls,

I was very interested in the choices teenagers were facing and making… because jobs were crap… there were kids who were not using drugs, but dealing in drugs and making fortunes.(Hayward, 2004: 255)

The result of this interest was Sweet Sixteen. (In turn, while working on the film in Glasgow, Laverty was increasingly aware of the new tensions between different cultures in Scotland after September 11^th, inspiring him to write Ae Fond Kiss (Mottram, 2004: 23).) Of the recurrent Glaswegian setting, and its suitability for his type of filmmaking, Loach remarked, ‘It’s a strong working-class culture, built out of political and social struggle. The humour is strong, the language is sharp and the people have a lot of energy’ (Mottram, 2004: 22).

    In the context of this ‘trilogy’ Sweet Sixteen is different to the others in that its main protagonist, soon-to-be-sixteen Liam, is essentially still a child, but is forced to participate in an adult world, and one of criminality at that. Ryan Gilbey describes the film as ‘essentially weepie-of-the-week stuff… insulated against corniness by some gritty specifics’ (Gilbey, 2002: 16). Several critics have noticed the tendency towards melodrama conventions in Loach’s films of the 1980s and 1990s, and in particular family melodrama (Hill, 200: 252). Liam is motivated by good intentions – a decent home for his family when his mother leaves jail – yet it soon becomes clear that his is a doomed trajectory. The mother that he loves so dearly ultimately becomes the reason for his downfall, he first becomes involved in drug-pushing to pay for their flat, only to be let down by her when she does leave prison, and chooses to go back to the boyfriend Liam is so desperate to keep her away from. Liam’s fatal flaw – his love for his mother – constitutes his down fall, as he stabs her boyfriend; the film ends with Liam wandering along a beach, with a certainty that he is soon to be arrested. Gilbey refers to an early scene in the prison visiting room, when Liam is supposed to pass drugs to his mother as they kiss, but refuses. Gilbey suggests that

This most primal union is corrupted before the film has even begun; the maternal kiss has been poisoned, and the only way for the boy to save his mother is for him to reject that symbol of love (Gilbey, 2002: 17)

However, despite this initial defiance, Liam is unable to cut all ties with his mother – despite the advice of his sister Chantelle – and the audience must watch this blind pursuit of a happy home with the knowledge that the outcome will inevitably not be what he hopes for.

    An underlying theme in the film is that of unemployment, in a community devoid of any communal feeling, ‘where drugs are the currency – more readily available than jobs’ (Hayward, 2004: 255). Loach’s more recent films lack the political idealism of his early work (Tony Garnett has spoken of the ‘youthful arrogance’ of these early works, and the gradual realisation that ‘the answers are not as pat and easy as I once thought’(Saynor, 1993: 11)),  reflecting the damage done to the working classes by Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s. John Hill points out that these years ‘had drastically altered the condition of the British working class and seriously undercut its capacity for mass political action’ (Hill, 1998: 18). This is certainly the case in Sweet Sixteen; politics do not concern Liam and his friends, the (under)world they inhabit being almost entirely divorced from traditional institutions of power. The film also lacks those ‘middle-class authority figures’ (Hill, 1998: 21) found elsewhere in Loach’s work (for example, the careers adviser in Kes, the council officials in Cathy, or even the health worker (and love interest) Sarah in My Name Is Joe). Liam and his friends are all just fifteen or sixteen years old, yet they live without adults (except the drug barons). Their lives are totally adult and devoid of any of the trappings of childhood or even teen-age, as they themselves assume the position of carers for younger children (Chantelle’s son Calum), and even the few child-like adults who are occasionally present (Liam’s mother). Liam, by the film’s close, has begun to assume those character traits usually associated in Loach’s films with masculinity in crisis, ‘petty criminality… domestic violence’ (Hill, 200, 253).