Ken Loach

Watch Ken Loach’s 1966 classic “Cathy Come Home”

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“Cathy Come Home” is a 1966 BBC television play about homelessness. It was written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett, directed by Ken Loach, and starring Carol White as “Cathy.”
A 1998 Radio Times readers’ poll voted it the “best single television drama” and a 2000 industry poll rated it as the second-best British television programme ever made. Filmed in a gritty, realistic drama documentary style, it was first broadcast on 16 November 1966 on BBC1. The play was shown in the BBC’s The Wednesday Play anthology strand, which often tackled social issues. [Source: Wikipedia]

Michael Caine and working-class stories in British cinema

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In the 1950s, the emergence of ‘angry young men’ writers and kitchen sink dramas like ‘Look Back in Anger’, led to an increase in working-class representation.

By Aimee Ferrier

For many years, the lives of working-class British people were invisible on screen. Not only that, but actors from working-class backgrounds were hard to come by, thus meaning that a large chunk of Britain’s screen icons were privately educated or well-connected figures. This imbalance within the industry prevented authentic stories from being told, silencing the voices and experiences of a massive group of the British population.

Posh actors dominated the screens with their received pronunciation accents that asserted them as well-educated figures. “The working-class person always had to have an accent before, was often a joker, and peripheral,” actor Rita Tushingham told The Independent. Indeed, there were hardly any working-class protagonists or stories about the plight of poverty, unemployment, governmental disillusionment, or abortion.

Then, in the 1950s, the ‘angry young men’ movement emerged within the world of literature, theatre, and film, changing everything. Post-war, a new generation of young people were feeling dismayed by the widespread levels of unemployment and dead-end jobs that forced people to work to the bone for little money. Many people were unable to afford nice places to live, and countless individuals were suffering from PTSD, grief, and a sense of malaise.

People’s childhood towns and cities were now destroyed by bombs, leaving what was once a community in ruins, and this physical representation of destruction and emptiness mirrored the emotions many were feeling at the time. This disillusionment came to a boiling point in the mid-1950s as people struggled to move forward and prosper in a country still ravished by the effects of war and economic disparity.

However, with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, a voice finally cut through. Michael Caine once discussed the play with The Guardian, explaining: “When it changed, it was all down to the writers. They started writing for working-class people and it made all the difference. Playwrights like Noël Coward, someone I later knew very well, wrote middle-class parts for the stage. If you had a cockney accent you were going to play the butler. But John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger in 1956, and that, I believe, was the first major piece of theatre that had a working-class hero.”

Things were beginning to change, with the stories of working-class people making more of a dent in popular culture than ever before. Other writers that were dubbed part of the ‘angry young men’ movement (although most hated this term) included Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and John Braine, whose stories really changed the game in regards to the representation of normal British people and their struggles.

At the same time, the Free Cinema documentary movement helped to pave the way for depictions of British working-class issues on screen. These filmmakers—including Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz—used a cinema vérité style to cheaply chronicle elements of working-class life to great success.

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Carol White: The Battersea Bardot – Interview with Ewen Moore

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By Chrissy Hamlin

British Actress Carol White was a household name back in the 1960’s, thanks to her performances in the gritty, groundbreaking black and White BBC TV plays “Up The Junction” &”Cathy Come Home” and the film, “Poor Cow”. Today however, Carol’s name has faded into relative obscurity, as is often the case in the fickle world of show business and fame.

In London during the swinging 1960’s, Carol was compared to Brigit Bardot and Julie Christie and worked with many well-known actors such as Oliver Reed, Adam Faith, Peter Sellers & Dean Martin. She was a highly promising young actress who could naturally play working-class female characters due to her realistic acting style. What many people did not know was that the women, and the type situations portrayed in these pioneering real-life “kitchen sink” drama’s, often mirrored events in Carol’s turbulent and chaotic personal life. She knew these characters well; she’d shared their experiences, lived their lives, and felt their passions, pains, and frustrations.

For Carol White, following her dream of Hollywood stardom only dragged her deeper into a world where the dark lure of drugs and alcohol affected her physical and mental health, which led to her making bad choices in her career and in her personal life. She may have met a tragic end, and never fully reached her potential as an actress for so many different reasons, but what she did do was leave her mark on a classic body of work on film, that is regarded today as one of the most important examples of social realism in British cinema ever, and for that, we feel her life should be celebrated, and more people should know who she is, because, in essence, her story encapsulates the very essence of the 1960’s female working class experience.

If you haven’t heard of Carol white or seen any of her iconic films, then watch our two part podcast interview below to discover more. Watch the full length film of “Up The Junction” & the film trailers at the end of the post to see Carol doing what she does best! We had a fascinating chat with Ewen Moore, the composer of a new one-woman musical, based on Carol’s life & work. Our interview was packed full of delicious biographical details and I learned so much more about this fascinating actress. Ewen did years of extensive background research in order to get right to the heart of who Carol was, so he could accurately convey her character and emotions through the medium of musical theatre. What he doesn’t know about Carol really isn’t worth knowing!

In Part One we discuss Carol’s family background and her early career as a young actress. We then go on to cover her rise to fame in the 1960’s in a series of controversially groundbreaking plays, featuring working class women, written by Nell Dunn and her husband Jeremy Stanford, that were directed by Ken Loach. We also talk about the historical context of what life was like for working class women in London before the rise of the feminist movement, and touch on what the social attitudes to issues such as women’s rights, sex before marriage, abortion and homelessness were, in the 1960’s and how things have changed today.

Watch 1966 Brit TV classic “Cathy Come Home”

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“Cathy Come Home” is a 1966 BBC television play about homelessness. It was written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett, directed by Ken Loach, and starring Carol White as “Cathy.”
A 1998 Radio Times readers’ poll voted it the “best single television drama” and a 2000 industry poll rated it as the second-best British television programme ever made. Filmed in a gritty, realistic drama documentary style, it was first broadcast on 16 November 1966 on BBC1. The play was shown in the BBC’s The Wednesday Play anthology strand, which often tackled social issues. [Source: Wikipedia]