Writer and novelist
It begins with a classic Sweeney-type chase, as three armed robbers and their driver follow a security van across Waterloo Bridge in London. In the Kingsway Tunnel, now known as the Strand Underpass, the security van explodes and three men meet a horrific end.
Move away now, avert your eyes from their charred bodies and focus on the women who are left to grieve their demise — the Widows.
Penny Wanawake, the smart and sassy black offspring of an English aristocrat and an African diplomat, carves her confident path through seven novels by Susan Moody, all written in the 1980s.
Penny is a wise-cracking amateur sleuth in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, a legacy which is honoured in the author’s staccato style and in the scattered references to crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and John D MacDonald. Penny is jokingly referred to as Samantha Spade and Philippa Marlowe.
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Rachel Roberts as Brenda in Saturday Night Sunday Morning with Albert Finney
The 1960 film of Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, based on Alan Sillitoe’s fine novel, is an acclaimed example of British New Wave cinema. It perfectly captures the working-class milieu of 1950s’ Nottingham (which is in the East Midlands, not the North of England as is sometimes assumed).
The film is uncompromising, with no attempt to soften or romanticise working-class life and characters. The themes of adultery, drunkenness, abortion, violence are explored with unflinching realism, courtesy of director Karel Reisz’s documentary background.
The recent death of Rodney Bewes, who played Bob in BBC TV’s Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, brings an additional poignancy to the wistful comedy classic.
The funny, sad, clever scripts of Dick Clement and Ian Le Fresnais are superbly brought to life by Bewes and by James Bolam as Bob’s mate Terry, both in the original series The Likely Lads and its sequel.
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The novel A Kind Of Loving by Stan Barstow was made into a 1962 film directed by John Schlesinger but Barstow went on to write two more books about the characters and the Vic Brown trilogy was made into an absorbing 10-part television series 20 years later in 1982.
The TV series, which is called A Kind of Loving, is an unpretentious depiction of the three novels and, in the portrayal of the relationship between draughtsman Vic and typist Ingrid, explores contemporary attitudes to love, sex and marriage, and the claims of morality, responsibility and individual choice.
In his 1960 novel A Kind of Loving, Stan Barstow (1928-2011) introduces us to Vic Brown, a young man of 20 from a mining family in the fictional town of Cressley in Yorkshire. He is infatuated with Ingrid, a pretty 18-year-old typist in the engineering works where Vic is a draughtsman.
They do go out together, Ingrid seemingly having had her eye on him for some time, but Vic’s infatuation soon fizzles out and he finds there is nothing left, not even friendship or liking. By then, however, Ingrid is pregnant, and he ‘has to’ marry her, as we used to say. Ingrid has a miscarriage, and the novel ends with Vic coming to terms with his lacklustre marriage, hoping that he and she might find ‘a kind of loving’ to carry them through.
Who still sends postcards anyway? That must have been a widespread response to the news that Britain’s oldest postcard publishing firm, J Salmon, established in 1880, is closing down.
The habit of sending postcards to people at home from your holiday destination may well now seem quaint, a convention belonging to the dark ages before social media made communication so easy and so immediate.
The stellar combination of Clive James’ witty, erudite, masterfully crafted poignant lyrics and Pete Atkin’s agile, subtle, eclectic music and understated vocal delivery produced a body of work which belongs in the finest songbook tradition.
Each song has its own delights, and each is moving and captivating in its own way. I particularly relish those which present a cameo of a person, a character who is immediately and vividly created through pithy phrases and sharp dialogue, whose story could be the basis of a novel or a film.
A sad farewell and thank you to Glen Campbell, whose powerful interpretations of Jimmy Webb’s lyrics have enthralled audiences since he recorded them in the 1960s.
The three songs here are mini-dramas which position emotional anguish in lightly-evoked, unforgettable locations which transcend their geographical identity. The lyrics take on universal significance, and speak to everyone who has ever experienced love, longing and loneliness.
Nearly 25 years separate Ken Loach’s 1993 film Raining Stones and the first episode of Jimmy McGovern’s 2017 television series Broken but they are united by the questions they raise about individual and collective responsibility, the relationship between people and society, and the struggle to maintain humanity and dignity in the face of a system which threatens to destroy hope and self-respect.
Despite Ken Loach being a humanist and a secularist and Jimmy McGovern being a former Catholic, both dramas feature priests as key figures, and in both the struggle to buy a little girl’s First Holy Communion dress provides a focus for observations about class, society and human dignity.
The whole dating scene has changed immeasurably since the singers and songwriters of the 1950s and 1960s explored the terrain of teenage love. Our younger selves had to negotiate the pleasures and heartbreaks of relationships and what used to be quaintly known as ‘going out’ or ‘courting’ without the benefits and ease of high-tech communications.
Take the humiliating experience of being ‘stood up’. There you are, at the appointed time, standing outside the cinema or dancehall, or waiting at the corner or the bus stop or railway station or wherever you arranged to meet, and your date doesn’t show.
Bitter Harvest is a film version of Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, which is a collection of three novels set in London at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s.
Its setting is The Midnight Bell pub in Fitzrovia in the West End of London, where the lives of three characters, Bob, Jenny and Ella, intertwine.
