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Tales out of School: Four Films by David Leland - Made in Britain, Flying into the Wind, R.H.I.N.O.
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (4th July 2011). |
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The Film
 Tales Out of School (Central, 1982-3) 
Written by David Leland, the four films that comprise Tales Out of School are true examples of ‘state of the nation’ television. They examine education and the treatment of young people in Thatcher’s Britain. As told in the special features of this release, Leland approached Central Television with the idea of producing a film about ‘the economics of famine’. Adapting this idea considerably, he was given (by producer Margaret Matheson) the task of producing a series of four films focusing on different aspects of the education system. Matheson and Leland both claim that they were allowed a great deal of creative autonomy in developing all four films, and both of them lament the lack of such creative freedom in today’s television landscape. Few of the films have been seen since their original television broadcasts; Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain is the most widely-seen of the films, having been released as a separate feature. This is the first time all four of the films have been gathered together for a single home video release. Disc One: Birth of a Nation (Mike Newell, 1982) The first film in the series, Birth of a Nation takes a look at the comprehensive school system in Thatcher’s Britain. The film opens with images of young children playing in a nursery. They collaborate and work together to achieve their goals. These images are juxtaposed, via the use of a lap dissolve, with a series of images of older, secondary school-aged children walking home from school. They push through a hole in a wire mesh fence, walk the wrong way down a corridor and refuse to listen to their teacher’s plea for silence during the school assembly. In the assembly, the students are reminded that ‘this term is an exam term […] the time when most people’s future careers will be decided. This is why you are here’. Whilst the assembly continues, we are shown a sequence of short scenes representing some of the students’ lack of respect for authority: a student is sent to the headmaster’s office for spitting on another student; one of the older pupils, Stephen Harris (Tony Seaborne), is seen smoking and vandalising the lavatories. Meanwhile, in the assembly hall the headmaster tells the students, ‘In many ways, this school is like the nation: there are far too many people who are content to get away with 7 out of 10. With more attention, more concentration, with harder work, these people could easily get 8 out of 10, and higher – not that I will be thanked for pointing that out to them or for pushing them forward when the going gets tough. I calculate that the difference between being a great nation and being a mediocre nation lies somewhere between 9 and 7 out of 10’. Watching the assembly from the sidelines is Geoff Figg (Jim Broadbent), who has only been working at the school for a term. He notes dryly to another teacher, Vic Griffiths (Robert Stephens), that the students are being addressed by ‘The local bank manager [….] He’s offering them interest free loans for the first three years after they leave school. They’ll pay it back out of their dole money’. ‘What’s brought all this on?’, Griffith asks, referring to the uniformed policeman who has been brought in to address the students. ‘The eighth commandment’, Broadbent asserts: ‘Thou shalt not nick from the local Paki sweet shop’. The film covers a number of important issues within education that are still relevant today. In a subplot involving Twentyman (Bruce Myers), with whom Figg soon makes friends, the film explores a system in which teachers are railroaded into delivering subjects outside their specialist area because the school is short-handed. Twentyman is a rural studies teacher who is forced to teach a science class. He is confronted by the head of the science department, Hodgeson (Fred Pearson), about the lack of marking in his students’ books. When Twentyman suggests that one of his students is a ‘bright boy’, Hodgeson complains that the student’s book isn’t very neat. Twentyman suggests, ‘Isn’t it more important he gets down what he’s trying to say’. Hodgeson responds by asserting, ‘No. The first priority is that he understands the rudiments of the curriculum. If he’s simply writing down what you’ve written on the blackboard, he’s not trying to say anything, is he?’ Twentyman says that he has ‘not been grading the books, but I have been marking them’ and adds, ‘I only took on science to help out the department. I teach rural studies; that is my subject’. In other areas, limited budgets manifest themselves in different ways: in the cookery class, the girls ask why it is that in the previous term, the students were allowed to cook rather than simply watch the teacher cook. ‘Last term, the school could afford to subsidise your parents to let you make things’, the teacher explains to her pupils. Figg has radical ideas about education and believes in offering as much freedom as possible to his students. In one lesson, he tells the students, ‘I don’t want you to spend the lesson copying out. I think we’ve got better things to do with our time. But you have a choice: you can spend the lesson copying out, or you can spend it discussing these, or any other subjects which may interest you’. However, he must battle against the students’ apathy towards their studies, their desire for ‘spoon-feeding’ and their lack of investment in their education: in response to Figg’s comments, a girl protests, ‘I don’t care. I’m not here because I want to be. It’s got nothing to do with me. What you starting on me for? [….] Don’t ask me no questions. You’re the teacher. You’ve got to take it out of your head and into mine. That’s your job’. Later, after Twentyman tells him that the students ‘learn more [about sex education] from the lavatory walls than they do in the classroom’, Figg teaches an unconventional class on sex education, opening the lesson by writing the words ‘Masturbation’ and ‘Wanking’ on the chalkboard. Circumventing the usual methods of teaching sex education, he challenges some of the myths around sex and invites the students to write anonymous questions about the topic, which he then answers honestly, winning the respect of his class. Figg’s unconventional methods attract disapproval. However, Figg’s major conflict with the ethos of the school comes when he confronts Stephen Harris for threatening another pupil with a lock knife. Figg sends Harris to the headmaster’s office, where he is held down by the male teachers and spanked viciously with a slipper whilst a disgusted Figg watches on. In the headmaster’s office, Figg also witnesses another student, who has been sent to receive punishment for nothing more than blowing a raspberry in class. Figg watches as the headmaster tries to persuade the boy to accept a spanking with the slipper rather than a formal warning. Figg suggests the headmaster should just ‘let him go’ and ‘give him a warning’. ‘I can’t’, the headmaster responds. ‘Why not?’ Figg asks. ‘You see what happens when you let them get away with it. You treat them soft, and then they think you are soft. Well, it’s got to be sorted out. It’s my job’, the headmaster responds. Disapproving of the culture of corporal punishment that exists within the school, Figg puts in a formal complaint and contacts the local press. This leads to him being ostracised within the school: he receives a mock award from the other teachers for ‘the finest example of unprofessional conduct’. Figg is left in a difficult position; his friend Vic advises him that he won’t be able to effect change and ‘Golden rule number one, the only rule: get through the day. That’s all’. Vic reminds Figg that he is ‘on the wrong side of too many people’ and must ‘apologise to the headmaster, or you will be out on your arse. No reference, no pension’. Birth of a Nation’s strength lies in its naturalistic representation of school life and its examination of the politics of teaching – which, a few issues to one side (eg, the application of corporal punishment, the split between CSEs and O Levels), is arguably as relevant today as it was in the 1980s. For example, Broadbent’s first encounter with his class is a realistic depiction of what it is like to teach a group of disinterested and apathetic students. Education is presented as a battleground where teachers and students meet; as the headmaster tells Figg, ‘You have entered an educational wasteland, where the fertile soil of intelligence ends, and the desert of ignorance begins’. The film is also presented in a gritty, pseudo-documentary style, shot on 16mm film, which works perfectly with the material. However, Birth of a Nation has some oddly symbolic elements. Each day, as the lessons are in progress, a group of teenaged yobs gather outside the school gates. Early in the film, a class of students refuse to pay attention during their maths class. The maths teacher responds by drawing the students to the window of the classroom and, pointing at the yobs who hang around the school gate as if they were anthropological specimens, telling them, ‘Down there, hanging around for no good reason, can be seen a colourful selection of those among us who failed to acquire qualifications before setting foot in the real world’. In one sequence, the headmaster confronts some of these former pupils. ‘So what happens now?’ one of the former pupils asks. ‘It’s up to you. You have to get out and do things for yourself’, the headmaster tells her. ‘Well, how do you do that? You never taught us that. You taught us how to rely on you. No work now, no work ever’, the young woman responds; ‘What have you done to help us live with that?’ At the film’s climax, the former pupils break into the school grounds and run rampage through the school. Although Leland states that this is based on real incidents uncovered during his research (in Twice-Told Tales), the imagery in this sequence (the former pupils pressed up against the glass windows and doors of the school, their silent and destructive rampage through the school and its grounds) recalls the ‘return of the repressed’ of the horror films of the 1970s and 1980s: for example, the zombified consumers who, in death, claw their way back into the Monroeville Mall at the climax of in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). This sequence is intercut with a conversation between Figg and Twentyman: as the youths set fire to cars in the school grounds and terrorise the pupils of the school, Twentyman tells Figg, ‘You do what you can. You stay inside of the system. You don’t walk out on the kids [….] Stay with it, Jeff. Lick the arses of the board of governors. What does it matter?’ The conversation highlights the difficulties (impossibility?) of working outside the system or simply challenging its methods, a theme that crops up time and time again in cinema and television of the 1970s and 1980s; Twentyman presents a ‘common sense’ argument that if people such as Figg choose to buck the system, they will find it impossible to effect change because they will be excluded from the very system that they seek to improve. When Figg tells Twentyman, ‘They’re leaning on you, brother. What are you going to do?’, Twentyman reminds his friend that ‘I’m a family man, with mortgage and commitments. What do you think I’m going to do?’ Running time: 81:57 mins Flying into the Wind (Edward Bennett, 1982) Based on several real cases, Flying into the Wind examines what happens when children are excluded from the education system. The film opens with a sequence in which a young girl, Laura (Prudence Oliver), disappears from her school. Her parents, Sally (Rynagh O’Grady) and Barry (Derrick O’Connor) are understandably frantic, until Barry finds Laura sitting alone in a street. That night, Laura wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming ‘Mummy’. This continues for several nights, and Laura increasingly resists going to school. Sally decides to keep Laura out of school; she pays a visit to the headteacher, who tells her that Laura ‘has reading and writing difficulties, and her number work is poor’. Sally is told that the transition from the infants to the juniors can ‘bring problems to the surface’. ‘Why has it been ignored?’ Sally asks. The headteacher affirms that ‘It hasn’t […] and neither will it be’. Sally asks for Laura to be ‘put in the special class’, but the headteacher deflects Sally by asking her if she thinks Laura’s problems may be related to Sally’s pregnancy and questions Sally’s decision to keep Laura out of school: ‘I think it’s important not to overreact: she mustn’t think she can get away with it’, the headteacher says, later telling Barry ‘You’ll pay the price later [….] She’ll never catch up, she’ll never learn’. Sally’s absence from school results in visits from the Educational Welfare Officer, Mr Harper, who suggests that Laura needs to see an educational psychologist. Harper argues that whilst Laura is not at school, her problems with reading and writing could be exacerbated. ‘I don’t think anything’s wrong with Laura, except school’, Sally asserts. ‘Oh, I see. “Everything’s wrong, except my child”’, Harper retorts dryly. Harper warns Sally that Laura could be put into care if the Wyatts continue to refuse to send her to school. Time passes, and a title card informs us that the next sequence takes place several years later, in 1980. The Wyatt’s are in court, and Sally attempts to defend her decision to keep Laura out of school. She reveals that he son Michael, who the Wyatts have also self-educated, is now 11 but cannot read at all, whereas Laura can now read – but only to herself. Sally claims that Laura is dyslexic, and this was the reason why she didn’t learn to read until she was 16. Sally claims that ‘Michael will learn to read [and write] in his own time’. ‘We don’t have a set routine or curriculum. We concentrate on what they enjoy doing. We don’t set standards. We don’t give them marks out of ten for anything’, Sally declares in court: ‘We have not taught our children; we have enabled them to teach themselves’. From this point onwards, the film uses parallel editing to connect the scenes in the courtroom with scenes set at the Wyatt’s rural home, where Michael and Barry are building a boat. They are approached in their workshop by an elderly man of the road, and whilst Barry goes to the house to fetch some supplies for the tramp, the elderly man offers Michael some advice, telling him that ‘If you’ve lived a tough life, you’ve got to live it till you die; get soft, and it won’t last long’. Meanwhile, in court Sally complains about ‘the fiercely competitive attitude’ that ‘sets people against each other right from the start’, which she suggests exists in Britain’s schools. ‘I think it’s the same thing. Guidance, control, structure. To me, it’s all the same thing’, Sally asserts, telling the courtroom, ‘I believe that laziness is what happens when children have their initiative taken away from them. We give children the idea that parents, teachers, someone other than themselves, has all the answers, and their part is simply to listen to them and learn. That’s what happens in schools; that’s the system, and unless you have the money, there are no other alternatives but to take your children out of school [….]‘Why do we never consider unconditioning the adult mind and not conditioning the child’, Sally suggests in court. Sally’s defense of her decision to home-school Laura and Michael is intercut with Barry and Michael’s fishing trip in their new boat. In the lake, they discover the body of the elderly tramp, which shocks and upsets Barry more than Michael; by contrast, Michael is curious about the elderly man’s death, and his curiosity continues when the police arrive on the scene to retrieve the body. Here, Leland shows Michaels instincts for learning, even in an extreme situation. Michael is visited at home by Judge Wood (Graham Crowden), who is presiding over the Wyatt’s case. Michael proves some of the lessons he has learnt from his father: boat-building, driving, his understanding of wildlife and nature. However, Judge Wood is unconvinced of the merits of keeping Michael out of formal education, asking the boy what he would do if he ‘wanted to be a doctor, a solicitor’, and reminding Michael that ‘It is not a punishment to be sent to school and learn how to read. It is your right, hard fought for and won’. Leland’s approach to the topic is objective: there are voices of reason on both sides of the argument. Sally’s claims make sense, especially in light of Laura’s extremely negative reaction to school; but Judge Wood presents an opposing perspective that is equally valid, that by excluding Michael and Laura from formal school, the Wyatts are limiting their choices, narrowing their horizons. Leland’s script doesn’t pass judgement on either point of view, but instead leaves the viewer feeling empathy for Michael, who is trapped in the middle of the conflict between his parents and the authorities. Running time: 73:52 mins R.H.I.N.O. (Jane Howell, 1982) As Leland states in the special features of this release, R.H.I.N.O. (which stands for ‘Really Here In Name Only’) forms a companion piece with Made in Britain, both stories focusing on what happens to young people ‘when they fall completely outside the education process and become the responsibility of social services’. R.H.I.N.O. opens with newsreel footage in which Princess Anne presents a message for schoolchildren ‘to respect [your neighbours] and to trust in God’, a message for unity amongst British youth and the children of the commonwealth nations. This message is undermined by a cut to a gang of skinheads chasing a young British Asian boy, who seeks refuge in a schoolyard. This theme of racial tension and prejudice underlines R.H.I.N.O., which focuses on Angie (Deltha McLeod), a young British Afro-Caribbean girl, but forms the core of the later Made in Britain. Angie is introduced as she arrives late to school; she is challenged by her teacher, but he has more pressing problems including an aggressive pupil who threatens, ‘You hit me, and you won’t go home one night’. Later, Angie and her friend go shopping, returning to the flat where Angie lives. The two talk about ‘bunking off’, and it is clear that Angie is a ‘latchkey child’: no adults are present in the flat, and Angie displays a great deal of independence and autonomy, taking responsibility for her brothers young son – who she collects from nursery. Eventually, Angie is visited by an Educational Welfare Officer. It is revealed that her mother is dead and her father works away, and Angie explains that she must stay away from school in order to look after Charlie, her young nephew. She also complains about what she learns at school. ‘If everybody was free to choose, they’d only choose the easy subjects or ones they enjoy [….] Sometimes we have to be told what to do, for our own good’, Brian tells Angie when she complains about her lessons and wishes she was free to choose what she could learn. ‘But I don’t learn nothing [….] School don’t teach me nothing I need now. I must be thick or something. Nothing stays in my head. Everyone’s bored at school, even the teachers’, Angie grumbles. Angie has been in court for truancy eight times, and each time her social worker has requested a supervision order. A care order is put into play, as we are shown images of Angie coping quite well by herself. She’s described by one of her teachers as ‘sullen, full of resentment - a large, indolent lump in the centre of the classroom’. ‘There’s nothing constructive in her basic attitude’, the teachers complain, and they describe her as a ‘R.H.I.N.O.’: ‘Really Here In Name Only’. The decision is made that she is to be taken into care, in Norwich. The rest of the film examines Angie’s life in care, which is presented as less than constructive: the placid Angie is challenged by some of the more aggressive youths. In its opening sequence, the film goes to great lengths to suggest that passive students like Angie sometimes slip through the net because teachers have more pressing concerns, such as the aggressive student who challenges the teacher who questions Angie over her tardiness. Angie’s self-taught independence is also presented as a positive trait, something she has learnt as a result of the situation in which she finds herself. This is arguably the least objective film in the series, as the decision to take Angie into care is well-intentioned but seems to have no positive effects on Angie or her family: without Angie, Charlie is left without a care-giver and presumably will end up in care himself, and Angie is placed in an environment with children who have far worse problems than she does – she is confronted by some aggressive youths, and towards the end of the film we see her dehumanised as she is given a strip-wash. When Angie asks one of the more friendly youths what it is like to spend your life in care, she is told, ‘Bugger all. You sit on your arse all day [….] [and] you’re supposed to look concerned about your future [….] They boss you about, and then they take you for trips in the van. They’ve got a stick in one hand and a carrot in the other’. Running time: 77:40 mins Disc Two: Made in Britain (Alan Clarke, 1982) 
Alan Clarke’s powerful Made in Britain has been described (by Robert Shail) as ‘a coruscating portrait of casual fascism’ (Shail, 2007: 44). Its protagonist, identified in the credits simply as ‘Trevor the Skinhead’ (Tim Roth), is a character who is ‘drawn into violent racism by a society that can find little use for him’ (ibid.). His face and body covered with tattoos depicting the iconography of fascism, including a Charles Manson-esque swastika in the middle of his forehead, Trevor is ‘an anarchist of choice’ who ‘knows the system does not work and, almost to prove it, he seems willing for it to chew him up’ (Chilcott, 2001: 57). The film marked the third collaboration between David Leland and director Alan Clarke, following the Play for Today stories ‘Beloved Enemy’ and ‘Psy-Warriors’ (both BBC, 1981). Leland had originally planned Made in Britain to be a static drama, focusing on Trevor ‘locked in a room, and talking to a camera’ (Leland, quoted in Rolinson, 2005: 104). However, Clarke felt that Trevor had ‘all this energy, it’s not good shooting off a static camera … We want to take him all the way down down the street … into the dark, out into the light’ (Clarke, quoted in ibid.). One of the repeated visual motifs in Clarke’s films is tracking shots of his characters walking, and such a shot opens Made in Britain: we first see Trevor, in close-up via a reverse tracking shot, standing up and walking through a series of corridors, accompanied on the soundtrack by The Exploited’s ‘UK 82’. As the long tracking shot ends, the viewer becomes aware that Trevor is being led into court (by his supportive social worker Harry, played by Eric Richard), where he is tried for throwing a brick through a window belonging to a British-Asian man. When asked if he threw the brick through the window deliberately, Trevor responds with a simple ‘Yes’. ‘You do not invite leniency, do you?’, the magistrate asks. ‘No’, Trevor responds brazenly. ‘Are you not ashamed of yourself?’ the magistrate asks. ‘No’, Trevor replies. Trevor is ordered to be taken to a youth residential centre, where he will reside for six weeks whilst being assessed by experts. He is put into a room with a British Afro-Caribbean youth, Errol (Terry Richards), and Trevor immediately tries to bully the other boy into giving up his bed. However, he meets resistance, and soon Trevor forges an alliance with Errol. The two escape from their room and Trevor steals a car; they drive into town and end up sniffing glue together. Upon returning to the youth centre, Trevor comes into conflict with the authorities there, physically attacking a member of staff. Following this, he is detained in a room by himself. There, he is visited by a superintendent (Geoffrey Hutchings) who reminds Trevor of his past and tries to offer Trevor a way out of his predicament. However, Trevor rejects the superintendent’s ideas and displays overt antagonism towards the figures of authority in the room. Afterwards, Trevor manages to steal the keys to his room, and he and Errol sneak out for the night – but not before they’ve broken into the youth centre’s records office, defecating and urinating on all of the inmate’s files. Outside the centre, Trevor and Errol go on a rampage in the town, throwing bricks through windows and yelling racist abuse. Parting ways with Errol, Trevor wanders through London and visits Harry’s flat, finding that his social worker lives a normal life with his wife and children. After leaving Harry’s flat, Trevor ends up on the streets and is arrested. The reality of his situation seems to sink in when Trevor is told by one of the policemen that ‘Once you’ve been to a DC [Detention Centre] or borstal, we can screw you, and we will. We’ve got you now. And once we’ve got your fingerprints, we’re gonna do you for every unsolved taking-and-driving-away in this district stretching back over months, and that’s a lot of cars, I can tell you. And you’ll go down, and you’ll stay down for years; we’ll see to that’. ‘Sounds great’, he responds patronisingly. In response, the policeman hits him with his baton. This visibly hurts and surprises Trevor. ‘You think you’re hard, don’t you’, the policeman states mockingly: ‘A lot of verbals. Just two things you’re going to learn: at home, at school, at work, in the street, you will respect authority and you will obey the rules, just like everybody else. That’s discipline. Most kids know that by the time they reach your age. Shut it, and keep it shut’. The film ends with a freeze-frame close-up of Trevor’s mocking smile (or is it a grimace?) as on the soundtrack we hear the cell door being locked. An astonishingly powerful film, Made in Britain features a captivating performance from Tim Roth. Roth makes the aggressive, nihilistic Trevor into a charismatic and sympathetic character. Throughout the film, we are led to infer that Trevor’s proclaimed racism is little more than a pretext for the expression of his frustration and pent-up aggression, especially in light of the friendship he forges with Errol. (In the special features of this release, Leland states that Errol’s friendship with Errol is based on the research he conducted for the film, during which he encountered a group of skinheads who had amongst them a black British youth.) What is perhaps the true source of Trevor’s anger and frustration – the lack of options available to British youth in Thatcher’s Britain – is suggested in the sequence in which he and Errol escape from the youth centre for the first time, and Trevor ends up in the local job centre. He reads a job description to another client: ‘Supermarket [….] That’s 50p an hour. Bollocks’. He reads another one to the same client. ‘Must be able to speak fluent Punjabi and Urdu. You speak Urdu?’ he asks the young man. ‘No’, the young man responds. ‘Fucks your chances then, dunnit’, Trevor responds. Trevor walks up to the desk and matter-of-factly tells the female employee, ‘Tacky jobs, aren’t they?’ Later, when Errol and Trevor break out of the youth centre for the second time (at night), another source of Trevor’s alienation is foregrounded for the viewer. As he wanders through the deserted town centre, he passes a window display which contains a mock-up of an idealised family home: mother, father, daughter, son. Trevor stares intently at the window display, the glass window an apparently impenetrable barrier for him. The mannequins’ clothes all carry price tags, suggesting the cost (both economic and social) of that to which Trevor aspires but can never belong: a stable family unit. Trevor’s rage is compounded when he drops in on Harry’s flat and finds that Harry lives a conventional existence similar to that depicted in the window display, with a wife and two children. At this point, Harry – who has until then been sympathetic towards Trevor – dissociates himself from Trevor’s activities, telling the youth ‘It’s your shit, you roll in it [….] You’re an arsehole, Trevor; you’re not worth a piss’. However, Trevor reminds Harry, ‘You wrote my file’ – referring to the folder in the youth centre that he urinated on. Clarke’s use of the Steadicam captures Trevor’s restlessness, as in tracking shot-after-tracking shot he prowls through corridors and along streets: in Twice-Told Tales (see ‘Extras’, below), Leland suggests that in his portrayal of Trevor, Roth ‘came off like a wired spring’ in every scene. However, midway through the film his movement is halted and he is held within the room in which his ‘future [is] mapped out in diagrammatic form on a blackboard’ by the visiting superintendent (Rolinson, 2005: 105). In the sequence, the superintendent reminds Trevor that he’s had ‘six chances to get yourself straight, get your arse back into school [….] and six times you’ve blown it [….] You go on nicking and making a general nuisance of yourself, when you should be here [in school], learning summat useful [….] What chance have you got, with your spots and your record, of getting a job against a lad with O Levels and A Levels and a decent haircut? [….] So, no job. What do you do? “Sign on”: the dole. How much is that worth to you? A place to live, food in your gut, a bit of fun. Nothing, it’s gone, broke. No job, no prospects, no cash. So, what do you do? [Thieving.] And you’re back here [….] And you’re on the bandwagon, boy; and you won’t get off. Prison, locked up like an animal. A job, no prospects; dole, no cash; thieving, no more chances; prison, an animal. Round and round you go. Well, those are your options. You created them’. Trevor tries to needle the men who work in the centre. ‘I’m British!’, he yells; ‘Aren’t you proud of being British?’ ‘I don’t really think of it like that, Trevor’, the man responds. ‘That’s because you’ve spent too much time locked up in here with all these niggers’, Trevor asserts; ‘You hate the blacks as much as I do, only you don’t admit it. You hate the blacks more than I do; that’s why you lock ‘em up. You lock up anything that frightens you […..] In ‘ere, it’s just the same as school: do what we tell ya, think what we tell ya, say what we tell ya; squawk, be a fucking parrot. I hate you for putting me in here, you bullshitters. You swallow your own bollocks; you expect me to follow it too’. ‘Every Pakis going to get a brick through his window, and shit and petrol; you just wait till it starts’, Trevor threatens. ‘I hate you for putting me in here. One day, you’ll fucking pay for it [….] It’s your fucking world, mate, not mine. Just stick it up your arse: I don’t want it’, he shouts. The superintendent goes on to tell Trevor that ‘We must co-operate, because I’ll tell you, if we don’t sort out something soon, all that [points to the blackboard], all that bloody awful mess up there will be the only options left. There’ll be no more help from us. You’ll be a total bloody failure, at sixteen’. However, in the face of this speech, Trevor is defiant: ‘I’m a success, mate; I’m a fucking star’, he declares: ’I’m in exactly the right place at the right time. The fact that you’re too fucking thick or stupid to see that, that marks you down. You’ll be put up against the bus, covered in petrol and shot, all of you. It’s you that’s fucking failed. I’m not your bleeding problem, or anyone’s bleeding problem; put that in your report’. Trevor concludes his monologue by asserting nihilistically, ‘Write it; lock me up. Who gives a fuck?’ Trevor refuses to play ball, asserting that he has found the system to be repressive, and he also asserts that his attitudes will never be changed by the punishment he receives. Trevor says that at school, he learnt ‘Be the best, otherwise forget it. Everything they teach at school is useless. It’s rubbish in your head, bugger all to do with my life [….] Work hard, get a job, do well, otherwise you’re no good, you’re a vandal. That’s what I learned. It’s a lot of bollocks, lies. We’re all fucking great. You ain’t taking bugger all from us: we hate you. You can lock me in here, but you can’t take away the hate inside my head. I can still hate you in my head’. However, Trevor is reminded of the fruitlessness of his protest: ‘Nobody cares about your little protest, Trevor. No-one gives a damn. It’s totally insipid and you stew in this ‘orrible little room’, he is told. The ambiguous closing sequence seems to suggest this: the brutality of the uniformed policeman visibly surprises Trevor, and the film ends on a freeze-frame of Trevor’s ambiguous facial expression – which could be interpreted as either a defiant grin or a tortured grimace. His angry protest has changed nothing about his situation; in fact, it has arguably made his situation much worse. Robert Chilcott compares the freeze frame that ends Made in Britain with the closing sequence of Francois Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (1959): like Antoine Donel in Truffaut’s film, Trevor ‘knows what is in store for him and sees no possibility for escape’ (Chilcott, 2001: 57). However, the closing moments of Made in Britain could be compared to another French New Wave-inspired film that ended on a similar freeze-frame: like the similarly institutionalised Colin Smith (Tom Courtenay) in Tony Richardson’s adaptation of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Trevor has achieved an arguably pyrrhic victory in asserting his individual will against the state, but in the process he has made his life much more difficult. Running time: 75:40 mins (PAL) Disc One: ‘Birth of a Nation’ (81:57) ‘Flying into the Wind’ (73:62) ‘R.H.I.N.O.’ (77:40) Disc Two: ‘Made in Britain’ (75:40) Documentaries: - ‘Twice-Told Tales’ (HD, 16:9) (38:58) - ‘Digging for Britain’ (HD, 16:9) (29:47) Stills Gallery (2:53)
Video
All four films were shot on 16mm. The 16mm footage looks fantastic on this Blu-Ray release: the episodes aren’t digitally filtered or processed. They have a naturalistic, documentary-like aesthetic. There are some scattered instances of print damage, but these episodes are in remarkably good shape, with Made in Britain looking particularly impressive. The episodes are all presented in their original broadcast screen ratio of 4:3.
Audio
Audio is presented via a Linear PCM stereo track. This track is clean and problem-free. Dialogue is always audible. Sadly, there are no subtitles.
Extras
Disc two contains this release’s contextual material, including Twice-Told Tales (38:58). This contains the reflections of David Leland, who discusses how he got the first film in the set produced. The initial idea was to focus on ‘the politics of famine and the economics of famine’. However, producer Margaret Matheson suggested a focus on education and offered to pay Matheson to research and deliver as many scripts as he wanted. Leland suggested making ‘four independent, separate, feature-length films’: two films would be about ‘the nature of education, what was happening in our schools’, and the other two would focus on what happens to young people ‘when they fall completely outside the education process and become the responsibility of social services’. Matheson is also interviewed, and she suggests that at Central, she ‘had the opportunity to commission pretty much whatever I wanted’. Leland talks about the research he conducted, including going into secondary schools and sometimes masquerading as a window cleaner in order to observe lessons as they were in progress. He claims that he tried to be as objective as possible about the issues presented in each film. He reflects on each film individually. The documentary also focuses on the reaction of a group of London teenagers to the films contained in this set. The teenagers suggest that there are some elements in the films that are similar to their experiences today, but there are also some significant differences – eg, in how students are punished. The students admit that ‘getting the right balance’ in terms of student freedom ‘is hard’. (HD, 16:9.) Digging for Britain (29:47). The interview with Leland focuses exclusively on the making of Made in Britain. Here, Leland talks about the difficulty in getting his scripts off the ground and suggests that in the British television industry, the people who are capable of taking risks ‘are getting fewer and fewer’. It covers some of the same ground as Twice-Told Tales. Margaret Matheson is interviewed, and she suggests that ‘creative freedom doesn’t apply in television any more’. The idea for Made in Britain was originally to have it set in one room. In researching the film, Leland spent time with some skinheads and also closely shadowed a social worker who inspired the character of Harry, Trevor’s social worker in the film. Leland reflects on a group of skinhead youths that he met, who accepted a black youth into their ranks – an incident that inspired the relationship between Trevor and his roommate in Made in Britain. The documentary-like aesthetic of the film is discussed, including the use of available light and the SteadiCam that is used to follow Roth throughout the film. Leland reflects on Roth’s suggestion that Clarke added much humour to Leland’s script. The original ending for the film is presented via a series of stills; it was deleted due to Clarke’s misunderstanding of the activity of trench digging, familiar to Leland due to his youth in the countryside but unfamiliar to Liverpool-born Clarke. There are also interviews with some of the actors, including Eric Richard and Sean Chapman. (HD, 16:9.) Stills Gallery (2:53). Stills for all of the stories.
Overall
All four of the television films contained in this set are impressive, but Made in Britain is the standout title of the collection. It’s a hugely effective film, thanks in large part to Tim Roth’s powerful performance and Alan Clarke’s handling of the material. It’s a film that is comparable to Clarke’s earlier Scum (BBC, 1975), and which also arguably looks back on the representation of the ‘Angry Young Man’ in British cinema, literature and theatre of the 1950s and 1960s – especially Tony Richardson’s 1962 adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s novella The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (and, by extension, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, 1971). Each of the films deals with a different theme and issue relating to education. Many of the issues are still relevant today, and the disaffected and disinterested youngsters to be found in Birth of a Nation and R.H.I.N.O. are recognisable from secondary schools throughout the country. The films are, for the most part, objective about the issues they cover; R.H.I.N.O. is the film with the least objectivity, due to its sympathetic depiction of Angie’s learned independence and its suggestion that by placing her in care, the authorities have placed Angie in a context in which she is more likely to come into harm – both physical and psychological. This Blu-Ray release contains very good presentations of all of the films, and a good range of contextual material. It is a very impressive release of a set of films whose distribution on home video is long overdue. Made in Britain is the most familiar film from this series, having been released individually countless times since its first television broadcast; however, the other three films are equally as powerful. This set is highly recommended. References: Chilcott, Robert, 2001: ‘Alan Clarke’. In: Allon, Yoram et al (eds), 2001: Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors. Manchester: Wallflower Press: 56-9 Rolinson, Dave, 2005: Alan Clarke. Manchester University Press Shail, Robert, 2007: British Film Directors: A Critical Guide. Southern Illinois University Press For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD. This review has been kindly sponsored by: 
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