Ken Loach

Kes inspired me to smash Oxbridge ivory towers

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Kes

Christopher Eccleston says Ken Loach’s film changed his view on “art for working class people”.

Christopher Eccleston has said Ken Loach’s Kes changed his view of “art and culture for working class people” and inspired him to take up acting to smash Oxbridge’s “ivory towers”.

The 59-year-old star recently read A Kestrel for a Knave, the book that inspired the 1969 film, for BBC Four.

He said Loach’s film of a boy who bonds with a kestrel had been the “most important cultural event” of his life.

The Salford-born actor added that it was the “greatest British film ever”.

The film, which was released a year after Barry Hines’s novel, won several awards when it was first released and was later ranked seventh in the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest British films of the 20th Century.

The former Doctor Who star, whose career has taken in films, television and the stage, told BBC North West Tonight that seeing it as a child inspired him to “smash down the ivory towers built by Oxbridge and public school and get into the arts world”.

“It changed my entire view of myself, of art and culture for working class people,” he said.

“It was an absolutely transformative experience.”

The film tells the story of Billy Casper, a working class boy who finds hope and fulfilment when he adopts a young kestrel and begins training it.

Eccleston said he was “completely and utterly beguiled by the idea that a working class individual like myself and my brothers and my mother and father could have a wonderful skill and could have a dream to be lifted from the pit, as in Billy’s case, or the factories in my mum and dad’s and my case”.

“I saw the film before I read the book and it changed my life entirely,” he said.

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Source: Christopher Eccleston: Kes inspired me to smash Oxbridge ivory towers

‘Hope isn’t just wishful thinking’—an interview with Ken Loach

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Director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty
Director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty

Director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty speak to Nick Grant about their new film ‘The Old Oak’

In their 15th film together director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty confront a subject that could hardly be more relevant. They thrust us into the dramatic bitterness felt by both an abandoned British community and weary refugees. Set in north east England, audiences watch a group of Syrians arriving in a derelict former mining area.

Right from the start we find a Newcastle United football-shirted bloke bellowing insults at a group getting off a coach. Trying to referee the situation is pub landlord TJ Ballantyne. Loach and Laverty don’t simplify the harsh realities of everyone caught in this situation. Tory and Labour ­governments and councils have taken jobs, education, training and pensions from old and young workers.

The refugees have lost out too—from family members to mental and physical health. Both are short of money and self-respect, loaded down by the most elementary of human needs. Dave Turner as TJ is utterly convincing as the worried, pragmatic manager of The Old Oak pub. He jostles the demands of regulars who carp on about the new arrivals with his wish to give the new arrivals a break.

TJ’s wife has divorced him and his estranged son has left him, so his dog is his only companion. He walks a fine personal and political line to survive. Loach told Socialist Worker that this character is key. “Everything around him shouts out despair,” he said. “From what’s happened to the community, the nature of work, the conscious cruelty to vulnerable people and the uses of hunger.

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Film Review: Ken Loach’s “Sorry We Missed You” Will Infuriate You

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He is perhaps Britain’s foremost cinematic chronicler of working-class angst and quotidian humanism.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Ken Loach first learned about the “gig economy.” The debilitating delusion underlying that concept — the dream of being your own boss, only to find yourself trapped on an accelerating, unstoppable hamster wheel of work — fits right in with the veteran director’s moral vision of a world in which ordinary humans regularly think they can outsmart a system designed to destroy them. Loach is perhaps Britain’s foremost cinematic chronicler of working-class angst and quotidian humanism. Strident outrage bubbles just beneath the ambling, improvisational cadences of his films. And I can only imagine that the old lefty director of Kes, Raining Stones, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley blew a gasket when he learned about how so many of today’s workers have been bilked into thinking they can be free operators in a tech-enabled landscape of merciless profit. […]

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Movie Review: Sorry We Missed You

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Ken Loach eviscerates the gig economy in this vérité masterpiece

With all the discussion over the last decade(s) about how the one percent are cast as these nefarious villains in their high castles, scoffing at and exploiting us mere plebeians attempting to survive in this increasing problematic era of capitalism, it is (dis)comforting to know that the tradition of documenting stories of the working class among filmmakers has found many new topics to discuss in their narratives. Mike Leigh, the Dardenne brothers, and of course, Ken Loach are delving into very intricate and humanistic stories that succinctly deconstruct the world of people ever on the verge of losing it, walking that razor’s edge of some sort of viable financial stability.

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