Garnett and Loach feature

Although older, they have not, thank heavens, achieved conformity or uniformity. Severed from their similar origins as film-makers of social conscience, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett are still alive and well and kicking Ñ and in an industry which might have thought, and hoped, their original fiery spirit had been quenched by circumstance.

But, divided, they have not fallen. From their great together days when they made such nation-influencing epics as Cathy Come Home, they have separated, each to do his own thing Ñthough they still share an adherence to conscience and causes, which makes them rare birds to roost on a commercial perch. They still make an impact.

At age 61, Tony Garnett made a recent splash of controversy with the raw and raunchy television serial of This Life, which spread itself with the abandoned provocation of an experienced hooker over two eye-popping series and is now poised Ñ the BBC tells me Ñ to gobsmack us again with a third series, whose story of the lives of young professionals has become a cult Isiclabove the rest.

That further extension depends on whether Garnett can take on creative hoard the playwright who wrote Fucking And Shopping Ñ a necessary force, according to Garnett, if This Life is still going to keep its ability to shock Ôn roll an audience (which it has taught conventions of perception) converted to its risque plotting.

When the second series ended early in August more than four million people had become addicted to This Life, with Anna (Daniela Nardini) joyously proclaimed as The Strumpet Queen of TV, an explorer who has sexually gone where few trollops have gone before in this TV peoplescape of lawyers and media-folk.

As a producer, Tony Garnett has always known what he could get away with, under the aegis of the BBC, having studied psychology at university and learned the lingua franca of the Beeb in his early days as a trainee. It cannot be said of him that "he knows where the bodies are buried, because he put them there" Ñ but he certainly knows his way around censorable bureaucracies, believing that most BBC employees, even in these days of John Birt, prefer Tony Garnett to Alf Garnett.

Be and Ken Loach became the darker arc of the Swinging Sixties with Cathy Come Home, an attack on the lack of housing provision for low-income families, and Kes, about a boyÕs crushed aspirations, which has been their most popular movie.

In a way their work became a copout for the rest of us. If they were doing charity work on our behalf by drawing attention to societyÕs ills, then we ourselves might not need to do anything strenuous; Cathy Come Home, though, did achieve a public outcry which actually stirred national conscience into putting government resources where its promises were. But it was the only agitprop movie to stir any tangible effect.

Both Loach and Garnet then became Kestrel Films, which embarked on a series of Left-leaning concepts, though the psychiatrist RD Laing had his theories raked through to provide Family Life, about a girl who is driven mad by the problems generated by her nearest and dearest. It was GarnettÕs one tribute to his university studies, in an understanding discipline of the mind where Laing was accounted a revolutionary.

Ken LoachÕs contribution to Kestrel Films was of a directorial authority "to clarify the lives of ordinary people", an idea that indicated an unconscious patronage as it implied that ordinary peopleÕs lives could be clarified only by him. It is an attitudp of knowing what is best that crystallised when the Mary Whitehouse battalions attacked the TVscreening of LoachÕs feature film, Ladybird, Ladybird, a painful study of a woman who had so many children she didnÕt know what to do Ñ and the local authorities werenÕt going to tell her, preferring to take away her offspring.

LoachÕs own preference at 61 is to shoot on location and with non-actors, though this latter may be an experience arising from the simple fact that he cannot deal with stars. "IÕm not a handler of headliners," he once told me, explaining why he had resisted the idea of Burt Lancaster appearing in his adaptation of Leon GarfieldÕs period piece, Black Jack. Instead, Load chose a French non-professional, which may have been why Black Jack was the most disastrous of all LoachÕs movies

Since then he has gone from left-wing diktats to left-wing liberalism, changing his view almost imperceptibly in the process and working with writer Jim Allen to ground him nearer the working class he wants to achieve so much for. Land And Freedom - an account of the Spanish Civil War -might have been a collaboration with the more cynical views of George Orwell rather than the Stalinist apologias that Leach would have hymned in the past.

CarlaÕs Song was another movie set abroad, and whether he will return to this country for his next film remains to be seen. He is not a man who has come to accord with the governing New Labour

Neither can Tony Garnett come easily to terms with directing; his Prostitute and Handgun were interesting in their ideas but slack in their projections. Tony GarnettÕs strengths are the putting together of a movie, assembling the nuts and bolts, being a producer Ñ as This Life has re-affirmed.

But that they are both still working in British cinema and television and putting it about to such a controversial extent, is a delight to be celebrated by all film buffs and film-makers. For they have a humanity which is not within the vision of the creators of the new cinema of cruelty such as Shallow Grave and Trains potting

Knowing their work both past and present, it would be even more of a joy if they got together again. We live in a country which is as muddled and confused as ever Ñ from the Scottish Labour Party to a new look at Pensioners.

Britain needs somebody to tell us where we are going wrong. Britain needs Ken Leach and Tony Garnett Ñtogether.

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