32. Our Blimps in the North

The Life and Death of the Labour Party

This week: a bonus-length edition about two screen dramas with a combined age of 109 years, for no reason other than that I watched them both recently. Enjoy!

Before we get to that: I wrote an appreciation of the 2004 Mean Girls for the Times last week (published alongside a very nice Reneé Rapp interview by Blanca Schofield), and you can listen to me talking about the 2024 version on Front Row with Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Tom Sutcliffe on BBC Sounds now. (It was an absolute thrill and a privilege to be in the studio with musician Mairi Campbell.) For those keeping count: that is indeed two pieces in close succession pegged to my tattoos, and as I've now run out of topical body art I guess I need to hit the studio before I can write anything else. Big Keir Starmer on my right bicep to get the jump on politics coverage?

And finally, I reviewed a book on the perils of modern dating. Next week’s email will be a normal size one, so tolerate this one while it lasts.

Listened

Oasis, “Don’t Look Back In Anger”

Yes I know this is out of character, but I heard it accidentally. It plays over the end of Our Friends in the North, which I rewatched over Christmas. I was a Blur girl myself, and at this distance it’s an effort to reconstruct what Oasis meant in 1996 — when Cool Britannia was just gearing up, before the 1997 Labour landslide, and long before the terminal souring of lad culture into the dismal grot of Nuts and Zoo. And that speaks to the incredibly fortunate timing enjoyed by Our Friends in the North, a production that started life as a stage play in 1982 then went through various attempts at TV adaptation before finally reaching the screen at exactly the right moment for a bittersweet retrospective on the Labour movement in Britain. When people wanted the nostalgia because the real thing was about to happen.

It’s now 28 years since that original broadcast, which is — gallingly — nearly as long an interval as the one covered by the show itself, which dramatises 31 years in its characters’ lives: idealistic Nicky (Christopher Ecclestone), pragmatic Mary (Gina McKee), ambitious Tosker (Mark Strong) and damaged Geordie (Daniel Craig). It’s Nicky and his father Felix (Peter Vaughan) who act out the core of the political dispute.

Felix is the old Labour movement, a Jarrow marcher who’s never recovered from the sense of being betrayed by the Labour party. Nicky is the fractious next generation, fixing his utopianism to different models which all fail him: first he commits to politics but his hopes end up strangled by corruption, then he joins a hilariously posh and ineffectual anarchist cell, then he comes back to mainstream Labour as a kind of this-is-who-Jeremy-Corbyn-wishes-he-was parliamentary candidate (he loses as a result of a Conservative smear campaign, which I probably found more outrageous on first watch, before I’d experienced the real Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition).

So the brittle father-son relationship is an allegory for the sundering of labour politics from politics-politics. But it’s also a human relationship, defined in small moments of failure. I blinked back a tear in episode one when Felix — desperate for his son to go back to university rather than take a lobbying job — tries to push some cash on Nicky, even though the two have been fighting. Nicky can’t accept it, because he’s committed to changing the world through politics, so the two end up feeling rejected and misunderstood by each other thanks to a poorly articulated act of love and generosity: it’s a quiet scene that tells the story of a lifetime of grievances.

Then I really did cry in the final episode, set in 1995, when Felix has advanced dementia: Nicky tries to berate his father into remembering Jarrow, but it’s much too late. Felix can’t even feed himself. The connection Nicky longs for (but incessantly sabotages) is missed again, and he ends up futilely angry with an incapable old man. My daughter (17, so three years older than I was at first broadcast) watched some of the series with me and declared it “sad”, which it is: it’s a series about the fact that aging is a succession of losses. Lost loves, lost ideals, lost hopes.

But, as the middle aged viewer on the sofa, it’s also a series about finding satisfaction in acceptance. Mary doesn’t lead a revolution, but she does make a difference, first to her own life by studying at night school, then to clients as an activist solicitor, and eventually politically as a councilor and then an MP. She might even have happiness, finally, with Nicky: she loves him for what he is, even if he can only see himself in the shadow of his own principles. Tosker does get his dream of being both a successful businessman and a musician, playing the opening of his own nightclub with an Animals tribute act. Is that bathos? Yes, but the series treats it with warmth, not snideness.

Most ambivalently, there’s Geordie. In the series, he’s been the victim of a violent dad, an absent father himself (he flees a shotgun wedding by heading south), then the patsy of a Soho gangster he mistakes for a father figure, then an alcoholic, a prisoner and a madman. At the end, he’s granted a little grace when his old friends embrace him again. But our last sight of Geordie is him walking away from them, crossing the Tyne Bridge while “Don’t Look Back in Anger” plays. What does it mean?

Usually I wouldn’t advise obsessing over an Oasis lyric, but it matters here: this is a song about letting the past lie, but an insistently nostalgic song, one that references Dylan and sounds like the Beatles, while also belonging to a musical movement that was lugging Britishness up to the millennium. (For Geri Halliwell to run in a Union Jack minidress, first Brett Anderson had to walk by being photoshopped onto the flag while flashing his fuck gutters.)

Maybe the burdens of the past are going to kill Geordie, or maybe he’s found the peace to move on. Either way, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the final moment of symbolism goes to the character named for the region where the show is set. I appreciate this ambivalence all the more because I don’t think Peter Flannery is particularly ambivalent in his own politics.

It probably is a coincidence, given Our Friends’ tortured production history, that Tony Blair would enter stage left just over 12 months later. But art rides the same waves as politics (one of the themes of the drama is that most people are Toskers, swimming along in the culture without trying, Nicky-ishly, to remake society). Going back to it, it has the feeling of a nation taking stock, setting its history in order ready for the future that’s about to arrive.

Watched

Our Friends in the North (Britbox), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (limited release)

I saw Colonel Blimp for the first time as part of the same Powell and Pressburger season that included The Red Shoes. Blimp feels more of the past than Red Shoes, but then it’s a film about creating a nation fit for the present. It’s also a film about humanising the past. Main character Clive Wynne-Candy is first introduced as the archetypal Colonel Blimp character, played by Spencer Trevor — I had to google the Blimp cartoons by David Low (this is what I mean about it being a film of the past), but the big belly, walrus moustache and the bath house are his trademarks. It’s World War 2, and our hero is being treated as an object of derision by the men of the Home Guard, who use his naive belief that “fair play” applies even in battle to trounce him in a military exercise.

That initiates a flashback to Wynne-Candy’s youth as a hero, with him now played by Roger Livesey. But even young Blimp is out of time: he gets into a duel defending the honour of Britain against “German propaganda” about Boer concentration camps. The propaganda, as Powell and Pressburger know, and expect the audience to know, is true.

This leads him to an abiding friendship with his opponent, German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (played by my historical husband Anton Walbrook, also of The Red Shoes and much less diabolical here). Those two things alone — the acknowledgement of British brutality, the fact that it’s a story of amity across battle lines — make it a bold film for 1943. Churchill called it a “foolish production” and tried to stop it being screened beyond the UK.¹

the acknowledgement of British brutality and the fact that it’s a story of amity across battle lines make it a bold film for 1943

But by no definition could you call it anti-British. Like Our Friends, Blimp follows its characters over decades (42 years, to be exact) in order to tell the story of the nation. It’s more obviously allegorical than Our Friends — most flagrantly, in the conceit of using Deborah Kerr to play three different female characters who are important to Wynne-Candy across his lifetime.

Strictly, this is an even worse case of Smurfette syndrome that Our Friends having one female character to represent the entirety of post-war female experience (at least Mary is allowed to grow old, whereas Kerr’s characters keep conveniently dying before they can stop being hot).

But I found it more moving than offensive by the end. This is a film, really, about how the present keeps slipping away from Wynne-Candy — why should that present not look like losing the same woman over and over again? His friend Theo is wiser and understands the change in the world that has already come (his dissent from Nazism makes him an outcast in his own country). Decency, if it ever was essential to Britishness (and the nod to concentration camps at the start makes this contentious), is a weak weapon again annihilationist zealots.²

It ends back in World War 2 with Wynne-Candy wistfully acknowledging his own redundancy. Once, he had promised his wife (Kerr, of course, dead in this iteration by this point of the film) that he would stay the same until the flood came and their house became a lake. The house has been bombed and the foundations used as a makeshift water tank: “Here is the lake and I haven’t changed,” realises Wynne-Candy, as he salutes the men who humiliated him at the start of the film. It’s a beautiful moment, and an extraordinary one to have wrested out of the caricature of Blimp — a figure who is, by definition, hopelessly archaic.

Wynne-Candy stands for the failure of a certain kind of Britishness, but he matters because he’s a man with loves and injuries. Theo stands for Germany, but a Germany made up of individuals with their own consciences and, for some, grief at the country they’ve lost. (There’s a mirror here of the friendship between British Powell and Pressburger, a Hungarian exile from Nazi Europe.) Kerr’s characters stand for the progress of women through the early twentieth century, from plucky but naive bluestocking to resourceful servicewoman; but each version she sees herself as a whole women, not a cipher.

Blimp is an allegory that insists, in the end, on humanity over symbolism. Like Our Friends, watching it gives me the strange sensation that I’m seeing one era of history opening the door to the next. I think I have lived through one of those shifts from the late 1990s to now-ish, and I’d like to see the art that does for that time what Flannery and Powell and Pressburger did for theirs.

Read

Tracy King, Learning to Think (Doubleday, published 7 March)

One of the things I thought while watching Our Friends was that it might be one of the last TV portrayals of straightforward working class aspiration: all the characters want, intently, to do better for themselves. And while the series doesn’t flinch from showing how hard that can be (Mary misses out on university because she gets pregnant, Tosker has to play nice with the Masons to get along), it’s also possible. Geordie aside, all of them end up doing a little better than their parents. Maybe it’s a consequence of social mobility itself declining, but you don’t see that so often now. “Working class”, in TV language, is often code for “underclass”, and the available registers are comedy (Shameless) or tragedy (Shane Meadows).³

Which brings me to this book, which is lots of things, among them a memoir of betterment through the kind of self-directed education that the state was never equipped to give a working-class girl — working-class, and traumatised by the violent death of her father. That loss is shattering to her already fragile family and sends King’s mother into the shelter of a cultish Christian sect, which leads to the opening scene of a very young Tracy being exorcised, an experience she undergoes with some detachment and much acting talent. It’s a set piece that I doubt will be bettered this year (in non-fic or novel). This book is revealing and raw and funny despite everything, and very much worth a preorder.

Gimme, gimme more…

• Oh, it’s the Amy movie trailer. Can my interest survive the knowledge that it includes the line “I ain’t no Spice Girl”? Uncertain.

• I enjoyed the people getting in touch to share their shock at the insanity of Swift fandom after learning about “Gaylor” from last week’s Tox Report. Here’s another example: Taylor fans deciding everything they don’t like about Taylor must be the fault of her producer Jack Antonoff. Not noted in this piece, though: the fact that Antonoff is effectively a gender swapped version of Linda or Yoko to disappointed Beatles fans, i.e. the person you can scapegoat for your idol falling a teensy bit short of perfection. Not sure I want to call it “progress” that this role can now fall to a man, but it is further evidence for the triumph of girl culture!

• “Judy Murray’s agent is not saying to her, ‘Oh Judy, you’ve given birth to a famous tennis player, why don’t you have a show at the Royal Academy?’” I enjoyed John Self getting into the weeds of the celebrity novelist phenomenon.

• Two good pieces about the Chappelle and Gervais specials and the critical and commercial schism over anti-woke comedy (bluntly, critics hate and audiences devour): Helen Lewis (“I’m not saying it can’t be made funny. It’s just a waste of talent”) and Hadley Freeman (“It may be stupid comedy, but we have been living in stupid times”). I used to think that liberal puritanism was ruining comedy by destroying the zones of discomfort where the truly funny lives, but now I think the worst harm is that it’s allowed good standups to get indolent on a harvest of low-hanging fruit.

• Speaking of liberal puritans, here’s a rum thing. This essay on JK Rowling’s Robert Galbraith novels is fundamentally a rave: “formally experimental”, “takes aim at all sections of the political spectrum”, “Rowling’s propensity for spite is exhilarating”. But it’s couched as a character assassination: “When she assumed the Galbraith pseudonym a decade ago, Rowling was putting on a mask. The mask of anonymity, the mask of detachment, the mask of adulthood. But on another level, she was taking off a mask — and showing herself in full, nasty glory for the first time.” As the writer admits at the top, this is really all about her “gender-critical politics”. Bonus points for acknowledging that “sheer nastiness is a privilege so often reserved for male authors”, and then going right ahead and penalising Rowling for her failure of femininity all the same. Hmmm, a “nasty woman” — where have I heard that before?

• Anyway this is the only thing that really matters this week:

1. I suspect that a lot of contemporary amateur anti-colonialists would be quite shocked by how much Blimp (both cartoon and film) attacks the idea of empire. But I also think that knowing history is often an impediment to holding self-righteous opinions about it.

2. I’ve used Britishness throughout here, even though Blimp’s Britishness is so Englishness-first that it wouldn’t be completely wrong to use the two interchangeably.

3. A small shoutout here for upcoming drama The Way, which I think skirts this trap.