Ivan Waterman speaks to the Palme D’Or-winning director of The Wind That Shakes The Barley.
For some of us, at least, memories of the sad newlyweds Cathy and Reg Ward, in glorious black and white, their hearts and souls broken on the rack of poverty and despair, remain vivid in the imagination.
The BBC Wednesday play of November 16, 1966, was to signal the arrival of a social revolution on television. Cathy Come Home became a beacon for the homeless in the Swinging Sixties.
While teenage girls swayed through Carnaby Street in their micro-skirts and Mick Jagger heralded a new wave of sexual permissiveness, a socially aware programme maker was able to divert public attention towards the far less fortunate.
Cathy Come Home was not just landmark TV, ushering in a new age of drama documentaries. It also saw the emergence of Kenneth Loach, then barely 30, an unassuming electrician’s son from Nuneaton in Warwickshire, and his mentor figure Tony Garnett, who produced Jeremy Sandford’s story.
The Oxford law graduate had already dropped any aspirations towards taking Silk when he met kindred spirit Garnett at the BBC. They were both men with a mission, film and TV programme makers burning to make a
difference. Nothing could halt their ‘crusade’.
“I didn’t belong in the law,” he says, looking back at the years when his proud family expected him to join society’s elite as a barrister. “I didn’t fit. I thought of myself as working class, I suppose, even though my father was a skilled tradesman. But once I had got involved in plays and the theatre at university, I was pretty sure I knew where my heart was. And once I started doing research on real-life problems and issues and reading about things which really mattered, I started to ask questions.
You could call it ‘social injustice,’ if you like. But I soon found there were others who felt the same way, who became good friends. We had similar principles and ideals and stuck to them.”
Writer/director Loach marched confidently on from Cathy Come Home to the movie business, adapting Nell Dunn’s tragic kitchen-sink drama, Poor Cow, before touching the nation’s heart with the superb Yorkshire rites- of-passage tale, Kes, which he co-wrote with Barry Hines and Garnett.
And while many of his contemporaries were being lured across the Atlantic by the big bucks of Hollywood, he was not for turning. “It never entered my mind to think of Hollywood and all the money I could have earned,” he says. “That was probably the last thing on my mind. That was quite alien to me. ‘Those’ people were ‘The Enemy’. It was a hostile culture. They represented something quite different.”
Sadly for Loach, he had few movie backers in the Seventies, and instead reverted to making class TV, through writer Jim Allen’s powerful period piece Days of Hope and Barry Hines’s lament for the mining industry in The Price of Coal.
“We just couldn’t raise any money to make movies,” he says. “Everyone was talking about Kes and saying how wonderful it was, how British film making was back on the map. But then. nothing. The whole industry was in trouble. There was no help for indigenous film makers.”
If the Seventies were frustrating for Loach, the Eighties might have left him with a king-sized chip on his shoulder. He was commissioned by the mainstream TV companies to make insightful documentaries about life in Britain under Margaret Thatcher.
But his controversial study, A Question of Leadership, never saw the light of day, banned by the very people who had backed him. Loach had focused his lens on the voice of dissent and the Establishment slapped him hard on the wrist.
He won’t name names but does identify ex-Channel 4 chief Jeremy Isaacs as one of the executives who turned on him saying: “I fell foul of the powers that be in TV. Important people feared losing their jobs or getting into trouble with the IBA. People were very afraid.
No organised resistance to government was allowed at the time. It was divide-and-conquer, and the rise of the SDP in powerful positions. They didn’t need to conspire. They were largely of one mind.
There was no apparent reason to censor us. I wrote pieces in the Guardian and showed bootleg copies of the films at meetings. There was no other way of getting the message across. It was very frustrating. Two years of work went down the pan.
For me, it was professionally disastrous and financially disastrous. They (the television companies) controlled the political agendas. There were endless ‘delays’ and false arguments to shelve the programmes. It was all tactics. Me? I got very bloody-minded. I learned that you never give up.”
By the turn of the Nineties, he and his producer Sally Hibbin were again exploring through their company, Parallax, the underbelly of British society. There was the touching Riff-Raff with Robert Carlyle and the
mind-numbing Raining Stones, which starred Bruce Jones and his favourite ‘son’ Ricky Tomlinson as a couple of loveable losers.
And Loach declared war again on his permanent bete noir, Mrs Thatcher, through his compelling 1990 drama Hidden Agenda, which laid bare Downing Street’s shoot-to-kill policy in the province. At Cannes, following the film’s premiere, he even found himself berated by furious members of the Right-wing British media.
Today, his stance has been vindicated. And he has just turned his attention back to Ireland with his latest mini-epic, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a £4 million study of the Irish War of Independence in 1920, starring Liam Cunningham and Cillian Murphy.
The controversial film won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival where he also collected a special award for his inspiring career as a social commentary filmmaker.
His new partnership with writer Paul Laverty has so far created seven films through the Soho-based Sixteen Films. Though Loach may still be a thorn in the side of the British film and television Establishment, he is revered throughout mainland Europe, with legions of loyal supporters in Spain, France, Germany and Italy.
Films such as Land and Freedom and Carla’s Song were greeted as classics abroad. “I don’t know why that should be,” he says, “but they see cinema differently. The reason is cultural. You don’t have to leave your brain outside when you go into a cinema in mainland Europe. The French and Italian film makers have more meat and muscle in their work. They are less geared to entertainment. It’s more like going to an art gallery or the theatre.”
He will be a very young 70 on June 17. Far away from his Wardour Street office, he lives quietly with his wife, Lesley. They married 43 years ago and have four children – Stephen, a solicitor, James, a TV director, Hannah and Emma.
Kenneth Loach became “iconic” – another modernist word he can’t stand – through Cathy Come Home, which also led to the founding of Shelter, the housing for the homeless organisation.
He’s proud of that achievement. He’d like to reach the masses more through television but fears reality or people TV has taken over to such an extreme that serious programme makers hardly get a look-in.
He’ll never be rich. But he has learned to bite the bullet over the years, directing TV commercials to pay bills when other work has been thin on the ground. But nobody has had the cheek to ask him to make Homeless Couples From Hell.
He says: “The drive inside TV is to make the cheapest product, which is sad. That has also destroyed the craft of directing because these shows are like home movies. It is a misuse of technology. People are drugged out of their heads on reality shows and the spin doctors have taken over. Nobody is digging deep and asking the right questions.
I never wanted just to make TV films about poverty. I am very proud ofCathy. It’s wonderful that people remember, that they look back so fondly. I was trying to show the bones under skin, make people realise what was really happening around them. You can’t do much more than that. ”
*Article courtesy of BAFTA Television Awards Brochure.
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