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LOACH, KEN
British Director
Ken Loach is BritainÕs most renowned and most controversial
director of socially conscious television drama. He is also
an internationally acclaimed maker of feature films whose
radical political messages consistently provoke strong responses
in audiences and politicians alike. In 1965 he received the
British Television GuildÕs "TV Director of the Year" Award,
while the 1990s have brought prizes and nominations at the
Cannes Film Festival. His considerable body of work, documenting
British society since the 1960s, is an acknowledged source
of inspiration to his contemporaries.
Loach worked for a brief spell as a repertory actor before
joining the BBC in 1963 as a trainee television director.
Significantly this was during the progressive Director-Generalship
of Sir Hugh Greene and coincided with Sydney NewmanÕs influential
appointment as Head of BBC Drama. LoachÕs earliest directorial
contribution was on episodes of the ground-breaking police
series Z-Cars, but he first attracted serious attention with
Up the Junction, a starkly realistic portrayal of working-class
life in South London, which went out in 1965 as one of the
earliest productions in the BBCÕs innovative Wednesday Playslot.
This success marked the beginning of a long and fertile creative
collaboration with story-editor and producer, Tony Garnett,
which led to the recognition of their particular mode of
documentary drama as the "Loach-Garnett" style.
It also positioned Loach as the exponent of a televisual
equivalent of the "social realist" British New
Wave, so popular at the time in the cinema, theatre and novel.
Loach collaborated with Garnett on a number of other celebrated
Wednesday Play productions, including, David MercerÕs famous
play about schizophrenia In Two Minds (1967), which he later
made into a feature film, Family Life (1971), and two significant
industrial drama-documentaries written by ex-coalminer, Jim
Allen, The Big Flame (1969) and The Rank and File (1971).
These demonstrated LoachÕs passionate concern to ignore theatrically
derived artificiality in favour of authentic dramas on topical,
important issuesÑdramas which give a voice to politically
marginalised sections of society. By far the most powerful
work from this period of LoachÕs career, however, is Cathy
Come Home (1966), a powerful study of the effects of homelessness
and bureaucracy on family life. This remains one of the most
seminal programme events in the history of British television.
Cathy Come Home, written by former journalist, Jeremy Sandford,
exploded with tremendous force upon the complacent, affluent,
post-Beatles culture of the "Swinging Sixties." Drawing
attention, as it did, to disturbing levels of social deprivation
far in excess of those claimed by government, the play led
to a public outcry, questions in Parliament, the establishment
of the housing charity "Shelter," and a relaxation
of policy on the dissolution of homeless families. Reflecting
years afterwards on this succés de scandale, Loach
explained that, though he may have believed at the time in
the potential of television drama for effecting social change,
he had subsequently come to realise it could do nothing more
than provide a social critique, promoting awareness of problems
capable of resolution only through political action.
It is not only the subject matter of Cathy, and of LoachÕs
television work generally, that struck contemporary audiences
and critics as innovative; his chosen form and style were
distinctive and provocative too. Above all, he was concerned
to capture a sense of the real, extending a range of practised
cinema-vérité techniques to produce a sense
of immediacy and plausibility that would in turn produce
recognition in the spectator and inspire collective action.
Lightweight, hand-held camera; grainy 16mm film stock; a
black and white aesthetic; location shooting; natural lighting;
direct, asynchronous sound; blending of experienced and non-professional
performers; authentic regional accents and dialects; overlapping
dialogue; improvised acting; expressive editing; incorporation
of statistical information: all these strategies combined
in varying degrees to create a compelling and original documentary
effect markedly at odds with the look of traditional "acted" television
drama.
In 1975, the distinctive "Loach-Garnett" style
was employed in a notable exploration, nearly four hundred
minutes in length, of British labour history, which functioned
as a poignant commentary on the parlous state of contemporary
industrial relations. This was the four-part BBC serial Days
of Hope, scripted by Jim Allen, which follows a northern
British working-class family through the turbulent years
of struggle from the end of World War I to the General Strike
of 1926. Loach, already subject to criticism for preferring
the docudrama form (deemed reprehensible in some quarters
for its potential confusion of fact and fiction), now found
himself embroiled in an academic debate about the extent
to which radical television drama, using the conventions
of bourgeois realism, could be truly "progressive." Loach,
of course, insisted that his priority was a populist, political
discourse rather than a rarefied, aesthetic debate of interest
only to a critical elite. In other words, Days of Hope and
the other strike dramas that preceded it were intended to
open the eyes of ordinary people to the emancipatory potential
of free collective bargaining within any capitalist culture.
Loach who had made his first feature film, Poor Cow, at the
height of his television fame in 1967. He became a major
founding partner, with Tony Garnett, in the independent production
company, Kestrel Films, for which he made half a dozen low
budget films between 1969 and 1986. His first project at
Kestrel Films was Kes, a moving story of a young boy and
his pet kestrel set against a bleak Northern industrial landscape.
Some of the Kestrel projects were intended for television
screening as well as limited theatrical release.
The Thatcher years found Loach increasingly in conflict with
those who took exception to the left-wing thrust of his work
and wanted to censor it or lessen its impact. Finding it
difficult to ensure transmission of the kind of television
drama he considered important, he turned for a while almost
exclusively to straight documentary, convinced that the non-fiction
form could more speedily and directly address the key social
and political questions of the day. If anything, however,
this route led Loach into even greater problems with censorship,
culminating in the controversial withdrawals of the four-part
series Questions of Leadership (1983) and Which Side Are
You On? (1984), a polemical documentary about the socially
disruptive MinersÕ Strike. It was probably this unsavoury
experience, and the greater freedom afforded by cinema, that
drove Loach away from television at the end of the 1980s.
The 1990s have brought Ken Loach renewed success and established
him as one of BritainÕs foremost film directors, albeit not
of mainstream, commercial films. Beginning with his political
thriller about a military cover-up in Ulster, Hidden Agenda,
which was reviled and praised in roughly equal measure on
its first screening at Cannes, Loach has gone on to make
roughly one feature film each year, usually with an early
television showing in mind. These are, without exception,
films of integrity which continue their directorÕs lifelong
principle of bringing issues of oppression, inhumanity and
hypocrisy to the publicÕs attention. The political content
is, if anything, more foregrounded than in the earlier television
work; the uncompromising focus on the disadvantaged or voiceless
sections of society remains the same.
Tony Pearson
Ken Loach
Photo courtesy of Ken loach
KEN LOACH. Born in
Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, 17 June 1937. Attended
King Edward School, Nuneaton; St PeterÕs College, Oxford.
Married: Lesley Ashton in 1962; two sons and two daughters.
Began career as actor with repertory company in Birmingham;
joined BBC drama department as trainee, 1961; director
with producer Tony Garnett, beginning with Up the Junction,
1965; founder, with Garnett, of Kestrel Films production
company, 1969; has worked on a freelance basis, chiefly
for Central Television, since the 1970s. Fellow, St PeterÕs
College, Oxford, 1993. Recipient: British Television
Guild Television Director of the Year Award, 1965; British
Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, 1967; Cannes
Festival Special Jury Prize, 1990. Address: Parallax
Pictures, 7 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8LS, England.
TELEVISION SERIES
1962 Z Cars
1976 Days of Hope
1983 Questions of Leadership (not transmitted)
TELEVISION SPECIALS
1964 Catherine
1964 Profit By Their Example
1964 The Whole Truth
1964 The Diary of a Young Man
1965 Tap on the Shoulder
1965 Wear a Very Big Hat
1965 Three Clear Sundays
1965 Up the Junction
1965 The End of ArthurÕs Marriage
1965 The Coming Out Party
1966 Cathy Come Home
1967 In Two Minds
1968 The Golden Vision
1969 The Big Flame
1969 In Black and White (not transmitted)
1970 After a Lifetime
1971 The Rank and File
1973 A Misfortune
1976 The Price of Coal
1979 The Gamekeeper (also co-writer)
1980 Auditions
1981 A Question of Leadership
1983 The Red and the Blue
1984 Which Side Are You On?
1985 Diverse Reports: We Should Have Won (editor)
1988 The View from the Woodpile
1989 Split Screen: Peace in Northern Ireland
1991 Dispatches
FILMS (director)
Poor Cow, 1967; Kes, 1969; The Save the Children Fund Film,
1971; Family Life, 1971; Black Jack, 1979; Looks and Smiles,
1981; Fatherland, 1986; Hidden Agenda, 1990; Singing the
Blues in Red, 1990; Riff Raff, 1991; Raining Stones, 1993;
Ladybird, Ladybird, 1994; Land and Freedom, 1995.
FILMS (co-scriptwriter)
Poor Cow, 1967; Kes, 1969;
Black Jack, 1979.
FURTHER READING
Bennett, Tony, Susan Boyd-Bowman,
Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott. Popular Television
and Film. London: British Film Institute, 1981
Brandt, George, editor. British
Television Drama. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1981.
Hacker, Jonathan, and David
Price. Take 10: Contemporary British Film Directors.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Keighron, Peter, and Carol
Walker. "Working in Television: Five Interviews." In,
Hood, Stuart, editor. Behind the Screens: The Structure
of British Television in the Nineties. London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1994
Kerr, Paul. "The Complete
Ken Loach." Stills (London), May/June 1986.
Levin, G Roy. Documentary
Explorations: Fifteen Interviews with Filmmakers. New
York, 1971
McKnight, George, editor.
Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach.
London: Flicks Books, 1995.
Pannifer, Bill. "Agenda
Bender." Listener (London), 3 January 1991.
Petley, Julian. "Ken
LoachÑPolitics, Protest and the Past." Monthly Film
Bulletin (London), March 1987.
"Questions of Censorship." Stills
(London), November, 1984
Shubik, Irene. Play for Today:
The Evolution of Television Drama. London: Davis-Poynter,
1975
Taylor, John. "The Kes
Dossier." Sight and Sound (London), Summer, 1970
Tulloch, John. Television
Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth. London, Routledge,
1990
See also Cathy Come Home;
Docudrama; Garnett, Tony; Wednesday Play
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