Original subtitles

NICK HELM: At the dawn of the 1980s, Hollywood was changing fast.

The new wave of American cinema in the 1960s

had melted into the era of the Movie Brats.

Martin Scorsese,

Francis Ford Coppola,

Brian De Palma,

George Lucas,

and Stephen Spielberg.

Spielberg with Jaws and Lucas with Star Wars

had shown the studios what was possible.

The era of the blockbuster was upon us.

American cinema was becoming slick,

and the 1980s would be all about money.

Having money,

making money,

the aspirational quality of money,

growing up with lots of money,

and growing up with no money.

John Hughes became the voice of a generation

growing up under President Ronald Reagan,

and he shared their strifes with the world.

Here in Britain, the teen genre never really caught on.

The Brat Pack, with their perfect skin and teeth,

had no place in the UK.

OK, they did try.

Oxford Blues saw legitimate Brat Packers

Rob Lowe and Ally Sheedy invade these shores.

Full of fresh-faced all-American 1980s exuberance,

they were to be given a rather dour lesson

in the values of boat-raced upper-class British nonsense.

It wasn't exactly a hit.

This is what we were doing instead.

Quadrophenia and Babylon were as close as we came

to '80s teen films.

They were about violence, alienation and fear.

Babylon is a stunning achievement.

It doesn't tell an immigrant story,

it tells the story of a first-generation

British-born Black Briton,

a good, hard-working talented kid with aspirations

realising that the system is stacked against him.

You got too much of this. Yeah?

Yeah. Especially for a coon.

I don't like monkeys who get too clever in my garage.

British life in the 1980s

was about to become dark for a lot more people.

But British cinema was set for big things.

Let's take a step back and see how the wealthy, white,

middle-class men are doing for a moment.

The Pythons,

following their success with Monty Python And The Holy Grail,

are trying to get Monty Python's Life Of Brian made.

Barry Spikings, the production head at EMI,

approves the film for a £4.5 million budget.

They start building the sets in Tunisia.

But then this chap, Bernie Delfont, who was the chairman of EMI,

finally reads the script and pulls them straight out of the deal.

So, who's going to step in to save a film

which is already second hand and destined to be controversial?

This guy!

Yes, George Harrison from The Beatles. What?!

I know!

Eric Idle was at a party with him, told him the idea,

and George said, "I'll pay for it," which he did.

Unbeknownst to the Pythons,

he actually used his house and his office as collateral

to raise the money.

When asked why he did this, he replied,

"Well, I want to see it."

George started a small film company

with his business manager, Denis O'Brien, to handle it all.

He called it Handmade Films.

By now, the Pythons were starting to go their separate ways,

and Handmade would be an important step in those careers.

Michael Palin wrote and produced The Missionary for them,

and showed his subtler skills as an actor, taking the lead role.

He followed this up with a highly acclaimed lead

in A Private Function, written by Alan Bennett,

also for Handmade.

Terry Jones had co-directed Life Of Brian

and that would be a launching pad into a modest career

as a director of fun, epic fantasy films,

such as the criminally underrated Erik The Viking,

and his beautiful adaptation of The Wind In The Willows.

Argh!

And, yes, that is Nicol Williamson as Badger.

Of course, the true cinematic legend that was set loose by Handmade

was Terry Gilliam.

Co-written by Palin,

Gilliam's first smash hit as director was Time Bandits.

HORSE NEIGHS, WIND HOWLS

Once of the most mind-bending and delightful concepts

to ever grace the cinema screen.

Wonderful! HE ROARS WITH LAUGHTER

Armed with a stolen map

detailing all of the holes in space-time fabric...

..six dwarves and one little British boy dragged along for the ride

go on a crazy adventure through time.

Once unleashed, Gilliam was an unstoppable force,

enjoying a long and much-loved career

as a distinctly visionary film-maker.

Just look at the energy,

the artistry,

and the sheer playfulness of it all.

Terry Gilliam is such a unique talent

and somebody who has, like, got just ideas to burn,

and just such an amazing sense of style,

and it almost feels like the screen cannot quite contain

how brilliant Terry Gilliam is.

And as such, the studio system is maybe not for him.

Handmade allowed people like that, artists like Terry Gilliam,

to make movies.

Or later, like, you know, Neil Jordan,

or people who are kind of like outside the system

and are not people who necessarily would do well

in a sort of conventional studio structure.

So, I think that then set Handmade on a path

of basically making these pretty maverick films,

because they were a maverick film company,

because George Harrison and Denis O'Brien

are from a different world.

They're not film people,

they just, like, make the movies that they wanna see,

and what they think's interesting and funny.

Handmade would even go on to give Eric Idle a rare lead role,

in Nuns On The Run.

And John got stuck in Privates On Parade.

HE LAUGHS

At a time of innovation,

Privates On Parade was a rather strange throwback

to British cinema of the '40s and '50s.

Based on a successful play, it saw John Cleese at his least subtle,

leading a song and dance squadron in the Malayan jungle

during the civil war there.

It would be a few years before he was to have his cinematic hit,

with A Fish Called Wanda, in 1988.

But this was all in the future.

As Life Of Brian was wrapping up, Eric Idle went to another party.

There, he met his old friend, actor Bob Hoskins.

Bob had just finished making a brilliant little film

called The Long Good Friday.

It's a film in a league of its own.

Bob plays a gang boss trying to break into the big property market,

with his plan to redevelop the docklands as luxury housing.

Then in one weekend, he finds his whole operation under attack.

His guys are getting murdered and his properties getting bombed,

and he has no idea who's behind it all.

The film was financed by one of Lew Grade's companies.

Old Lew saw the film, hated it,

and decided to edit out all the bits he considered too much,

and just stick it on TV.

Bob, director John McKenzie and producer Barry Hanson

were desperate to avoid this.

So Bob, having heard about Handmade, approached Eric,

and Handmade bought the film.

Within 12 months, they had saved two films from oblivion

which now sit within the BFI's top 30 British films of all time.

Not a bad start.

They were producing films of excellence,

and also distributing films made by other people.

One of the films they distributed was this film, Venom.

Venom is a tense thriller about a stand-off between police

and a criminal gang, following a botched kidnapping attempt.

Don't worry.

It stars Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed, Sterling Hayden, Sarah Miles,

and... oh, yes,

a massive black mamba snake which is loose in the house!

And yes, well spotted, that is Nicol Williamson.

By the way, this isn't even the only killer snake film

Oliver Reed was in that year.

What a career!

Anyway, where were we?

Yes, Handmade.

So, at the same time as Handmade was achieving early success,

something else was about to happen in London.

This is Jake Eberts, a Canadian business whiz

who became a successful Wall Street investor

working in London.

He was bored and depressed,

and when he was offered the chance

to put together an investment package for a film,

it seemed like a new and exciting venture.

That film was Watership Down.

Yeah, you remember it. It did incredibly well,

made Ebert's investors a lot of money,

and showed him a path to a new career.

That was when Jake started Goldcrest.

Enter our old friend, David Puttnam.

Since we last saw Puttnam, he's had quite the adventure.

I owed the National Westminster Bank £68,000,

and I had no means possible of ever repaying it.

Because of that tax hike,

he's had to spend a couple of years in Malibu, poor guy (!)

He's bagged his first Oscar for Midnight Express,

a film he produced and his old friend Alan Parker directed.

The story of a young American drug smuggler who got caught

and ended up in the brutal Turkish prison system.

The lead character was always supposed to elicit some sympathy,

but was not set up as the hero,

while Turkey's law enforcement community

was not supposed to be cast as the straight villains of the piece.

Puttnam worried this had not quite come across.

I think the film is an extraordinarily well-made film.

But it's got edges to it that I'm uncomfortable with,

and was uncomfortable with at the time.

One day, whilst ill in his Malibu pad,

he found a book about the history of the Olympic Games.

I sat there reading it, and I came across this one paragraph

about this guy called Liddell, who'd weirdly, having got to Paris,

refused to run in the heats because they were being run on a Sunday,

and was able to switch to the 400 metres.

This was a story Puttnam could get behind.

Many of his old pals from the ad agency

were now big Hollywood directors.

Ridley Scott's Alien had launched him into the stratosphere.

Alan Parker had been Oscar-nominated for Midnight Express.

Adrian Lyne had made the American film Foxes with Puttnam,

and was a couple of years away from a run of smash hit US films,

including Flashdance,

9 1/2 Weeks,

and Fatal Attraction.

At 45 years old, Hugh Hudson had a long and illustrious career

directing commercials,

and it was really that combination

of his ingrained talent to sell through film

and Puttnam's dogged determination to make a film

that led to the massive hit which was Chariots Of Fire.

It's a bit of an odd watch now.

The iconic synth soundtrack by Vangelis

forever strands it in the '80s,

and its lack of cynicism or darkness leaves it somewhat out of step.

But there can be no denying that it was one of the most important films

in modern British cinema history in a variety of ways.

It made over $59 million,

and won four Oscars.

Chariots of Fire's screenwriter was Colin Welland,

who you might remember as the nice teacher from Kes.

He won himself an Oscar for Chariots Of Fire,

and his parting words were...

The British are coming.

This was partially true.

The magic trick that Chariots Of Fire pulled off

over the British audience and industry

could only have been the product of a true believer

and a master salesman.

It sold Britain to the world,

but it also sold Britain to the British.

It soothed the British soul

with a celebration of stiff upper lip,

good Christian values,

colonial poshos speaking properly,

good hard work, Britain wins the race,

Rule Britannia and God save the bloody Queen, rah!

There was another thing that took place with Chariots.

If you believe in the purpose of things,

Chariots Of Fire got made, got made.

The idea of that film winning the Oscar was insane.

It showed the industry that a film with an unknown lead cast

and an uplifting tone could make a lot of money.

Change was coming, but not just from the big screen.

On 2nd November 1982,

Britain got its fourth TV channel.

Channel 4 was a slightly strange hybrid

of the other British channels.

It was commercial like ITV,

and not licence-funded like the BBC channels,

but it was publicly owned,

and, for the first decade or so,

had its own remit to demonstrate innovation,

appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society,

and include programmes of an educative value.

Under influential commissioning editor David Rose,

they produced feature films from the very beginning.

And on their launch night, they showed this film by Stephen Frears -

Walter, starring Ian McKellen.

I remember, at the end of the first week of Channel 4,

when David Rose came in the room, everybody clapped.

So, everybody could see that what he was doing

was the most progressive and the most successful.

This is the first time we've mentioned Frears,

but he's been lurking in the background for some time.

He started his career as assistant stage manager

for the 1963 Cambridge Footlights Revue.

He was an assistant director

on both Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment,

and If...

and in 1968, he was Albert Finney's right-hand man on Charlie Bubbles.

When Frears directed his first film in 1971, Finney starred.

The film was Gumshoe.

Frears has had arguably one of the most impressive

and adaptable careers of any director in British film history.

Two Oscars and three BAFTAs,

if you care about that kind of thing.

SHE YAWNS

But more importantly, a career some 50 years in length,

of unwavering quality.

Ta-da!

Most impressive is the sheer breadth of style and tone of his work,

from Dangerous Liaisons to High Fidelity.

His films were often based on true stories,

and strong female leads are a hallmark.

So, with Channel 4, Goldcrest and Handmade all making films,

there was a huge temporal shift for British cinema.

Up to this point, what got made depended on what got funded,

and the people holding the purse strings

were generally business people.

Goldcrest, now happily bankrolling David Puttnam's output,

could see that there was room for distinctly British stories

with large budgets on the global stage.

They would, in just a few short years,

go on to great financial and critical success

with Gandhi,

Local Hero,

and The Killing Fields.

David Rose at Channel 4 was doing something different, though.

Informed by their remit of producing work with cultural diversity,

and perhaps without the pressure of producing work

which would be commercially profitable,

they just started churning out great films.

They were cheap!

It's as simple as that.

You know, Goldcrest were making The Killing Fields

and Room With A View, and we were making scruff...

Laundrette was a scruffy little film we made in South London.

The budgets were low, but the results were stratospheric.

They were launching waves of new British talent every year.

In 1984, Channel 4 funded Marek Kanievska's adaptation

of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country,

a spy story with a strong homosexual element.

Giving leading roles and careers to then-unknown actors Rupert Everett

and my mum's favourite, Colin Firth.

Letter To Brezhnev gave cinema a regional voice.

Liverpudlian writer Frank Clarke

told a truly contemporary story of the North of England

under the hopelessness of Thatcherism.

It's just that I work all week in that dump,

doing a job that's fucking disgusting.

But the reason I do that job is because I wanna survive.

It managed to also be an uplifting and darkly entertaining yarn,

considerably helped by the casting of his sister, Margi Clarke.

Stephen Frears directed My Beautiful Laundrette,

the first screenplay from playwright Hanif Kureishi.

David Rose came to me and said, "Will you write a film for Film4?"

And around that time,

I'd been hanging around laundrettes a lot, as you do.

Because my father rather doubted my ability

to make a living as a writer,

he thought I'd better run some laundrettes.

So, when I got this gig from Channel 4, the commission,

I wrote a film about a bloke running a laundrette.

It was also the first lead role for Daniel Day Lewis.

There ain't nothing I can say to make it...

At the heart of the story is an interracial gay relationship.

There's only things I can do to say...

Channel 4 decided they wanted to release it in the cinema

before showing it on TV.

When I made The Laundrette, I said, "This'll only be for television,

"and I want it to be for television,"

cos I thought what it was saying was very important

and should have as large an audience as possible.

People started trying to buy it,

and then Derek Malcolm, the creative lead at The Guardian,

said, "This is the film we've all been waiting for,

"this is the breakthrough."

It was a huge success

and was nominated for the Best Screenplay Oscar.

And nobody mucked around with us in any shape or form at all,

I don't think anybody thought anybody would ever go and see

this film about, you know, a gay Pakistani running a laundrette.

I just remember Stephen walking up and down, saying,

"Go on, make it more horrible, make it more violent,

"make it more edgy."

I thought those were the greatest notes

I'd ever received in my life, actually.

It was completely liberating and very free.

This was a big moment for Channel 4, as it became apparent

that the quality of many of these films were so high,

they could have a cinema release before their TV debut.

What we could do in Britain was make little interesting films

about how we were living now,

and make those films quite quickly and quite cheaply. And some of them,

like My Beautiful Laundrette, might be hits.

Following Laundrette, queer cinema moved more into the mainstream,

through films like Maurice,

which established Hugh Grant's leading man status.

A dangerous man.

And Prick Up Your Ears, Stephen Frears' Joe Orton biopic,

starring Gary Oldman.

Interracial and non-traditional relationships were also explored,

for example, Frears' and Kureishi's second film together,

Sammy And Rosie Get Laid.

IN UNISON: You took your fucking time, didn't you?

THEY LAUGH

Rita, Sue And Bob Too was also an important film,

as it was the only screenplay from playwright Andrea Dunbar.

Like Shelagh Delaney before her,

Dunbar was a working-class teenager from an industrial northern city

when her first play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

She only wrote two more before her tragic death at the age of 29.

She wasn't happy with the finished film,

but Rita, Sue And Bob Too remains an energetic

and totally unique look at sexual politics

in the working-class North of Thatcher's Britain.

It's all your fault. If you had sex with him,

he wouldn't have to go elsewhere. Keep your mouth shut!

Thatcher's Britain - something we should talk about.

Margaret Thatcher was important to every aspect

of the cultural life, the creative landscape,

the financial landscape.

Everything. She touched every part.

And it was...

It was incredibly clear who one's enemy was.

It was unashamed brutality, and a desire to take down a system

that had been there for many, many years.

And culturally, all the art of that time

was very much in reaction to that.

All art? Even this?

When Mike Palin and I went down to the Taormina Film Festival,

and at the press conference, the questions we were asked,

it was all about Thatcher, and we suddenly realised

we had made a film that was really anti-Thatcher,

and we were talking about it.

At least, the people watching thought that's what we were doing,

is making social comments about life under Thatcher.

Which I wasn't thinking of at all,

but it was the reality of the world we were in.

Her stint as prime minister almost exactly correlates

with the years we look at in this episode,

1979 to 1990.

She was a polarising figure

with an agenda of privatising national services,

deregulation, and the destruction of the trade unions.

Whole areas of Great Britain have never recovered

from the impact of those policies.

It was really the beginning of neoliberalism.

Thatcher was, you know, a really strong ideological figure.

The woman who ruined Britain, really.

Yet to many, she was a hero,

and she espoused a popular notion of individualism

and small government involvement.

The '80s was the time when the political consciousness shifted.

And it moved from the idea of people working together

for the public benefit,

as opposed to people working individually,

where your neighbour is your enemy, not your comrade.

Nominally, she supported the hard worker,

regardless of class, colour or creed.

And she made social mobility possible

for a working-class generation

for the first time since the '60s.

We were particularly opposed to Mrs Thatcher,

who, God bless her, had set up Channel 4.

So it's... And made us all... actually, made us all into

the small businessmen she dreamed of. So...

she won, she won in the end.

She turned us into businessmen.

Not all of us. Not all of us.

In 1983, Goldcrest produced The Ploughman's Lunch,

written by Ian McEwan, directed by Richard Eyre.

It is perhaps the perfect encapsulation

of where Britain was in the '80s.

Jonathan Pryce plays a BBC radio journalist

researching a book about the Suez Crisis.

He is one of the beneficiaries of social mobility from the '60s,

and claims to have rejected socialism

for an ambiguous and amorphous,

generally selfish lack of a moral compass.

His friends are louche and snide. Hello, Tim Curry.

But since he has an affair with his new girlfriend's mother,

who he is only using for her own unique library

of reference material for his book,

what more does he deserve?

He accepts the kindness of strangers...

..only to ignore them at moments he considers awkward.

Whilst he dines in country piles with landed bohemian lefties,

he ignores his own father's pleas to visit his dying mother.

How is she?

The only honest character in the whole film is perhaps this guy,

the cuckolded stepfather of his girlfriend,

who takes him out to a pub for the titular...

Ploughman's lunch. Ploughman's lunch!

Traditional English fare.

In fact, it's the invention of an advertising campaign

we ran in the early '60s to encourage people to eat in pubs.

You're kidding! HE CHUCKLES

A completely successful fabrication of the past.

The lunch, like the nationalism which Thatcher ably whipped up

around the Falklands War, was a manipulation.

Britain regularly falls for its own myth of imperialism,

sovereignty and superiority.

But The Ploughman's Lunch,

like Thatcherism itself was doing at the time,

exposed an uncomfortable truth.

Jonathan Pryce, so often cinema's everyman,

is neither a hero nor a villain,

just an individual doing what's right for himself

in any given situation.

As much as we might like to pretend otherwise,

this might be the most accurate portrayal of an Englishman

in film history.

From the Englishman to the British woman.

With so much diversity of experience occurring on the screen,

who were the women emerging

as strong directorial voices behind the screen?

CICADAS CHIRPING

Depressing, isn't it?

There had been women directing films -

Wendy Toye and Muriel Box both had decent careers

in the 1950s and into the early '60s,

Joan Littlewood, a huge force in British theatre,

had directed a fantastic film called Sparrows Can't Sing.

And then...

that was kind of it.

In the '70s and '80s,

some female voices emerged in art film.

The BFI had funded Pat Murphy's film Maeve,

and Sally Potter had made The Gold Diggers,

but both remain pretty obscure.

I always felt that all films were made for me to enjoy,

and to enjoy, to absorb, to relate to.

Erm... And that, therefore,

at some point, I would be behind the camera,

and I would be equally able to put out films

that others of all genders would be able to enjoy and relate to as well.

It was only later that I became aware

of this sort of burning feeling, really,

of something being wrong in the equation.

And... Because clearly, it wasn't about a lack of skill.

It wouldn't be until the '90s and noughties

that we'd see women really start to take a place

directing narrative feature film.

There certainly didn't seem to be a place for female directors

at Goldcrest, which was in some ways looking back, rather than forward.

Chariots Of Fire had made them some money

and won them some Oscars,

and it seemed like now might be the time to... go epic.

British cinema had never really done epic,

with the one notable exception of David Lean,

often still regarded as Britain's greatest ever film director.

Lean told hugely cinematic historical tales

with big budgets, big stars,

and big lenses.

He was still working at this time, and made his last film,

A Passage To India, in 1984.

This was the first film he'd made in a decade and a half,

and would prove to be his last one ever.

With Lean on the out, Goldcrest were to find another figurehead.

Dickie!

By now, Lord Attenborough had been cutting his teeth

with epics for his last couple of films,

Young Winston, an early Churchill biopic,

and all-star World War II film A Bridge Too Far.

But his real passion was invested in his 15-year battle

to bring a Gandhi biopic to the screen.

Goldcrest put up the final piece of funding to achieve this.

Gandhi was a global smash hit

of a size nobody could have anticipated.

On a $22 million production budget,

it returned over $120 million at the box office.

It won eight Oscars, all the biggies,

and became an instant classic.

So, Goldcrest had won big on two British produced epics,

both modestly budgeted,

and with unknown principal leads

supported by a cast of respected character actors.

Just imagine what could happen with a bigger budget,

and huge stars.

So, right about the mid '80s,

you had Goldcrest, Handmade and Channel 4

producing, financing and distributing

films at all levels of budget.

Respectively, high, medium and low.

On the scene arrived Palace Pictures,

the rowdy outsiders.

Born from and based out of the cult London cinema The Scala,

Nick Powell and Stephen Woolley were getting films made

despite having no money of their own.

When Nick started Palace,

it was a small idea of starting a video label,

that through our success, and my enthusiasm, partly,

grew into something a bit more tangible within the film business.

I deliberately hired staff who often hadn't worked in the film industry,

and I acquired films that the industry themselves

had rejected time and again.

And so, we were against the grain,

because the grain was not good.

We didn't want to fall into that kind of "this is how you do it"

sense of releasing films on a conveyor belt,

so we tried to make each film we released a bit of an event.

And nobody in Britain was doing that.

I've certainly been one of the people

who has tried to shake it up a little bit.

Selling projects to their investors through their own sheer passion,

and leading to a truly bizarre and wonderful output.

They produced Neil Jordan's stunning The Company Of Wolves.

A singular vision,

a British fairy tale...

..for grown-ups.

It was an incredible moment in British film history,

where a huge variety of distinctly British films,

representing a vast swathe of the cultural experience,

were being made and being seen.

And then two things happened.

The first could have been predicted.

The British film industry had always been hugely reliant on tax breaks,

tax write-offs, and various financial loopholes

to attract funding.

Thatcher's government put a swift end to that.

That was the first thing that happened.

The second? Well, the second thing that happened was...

I think we might need a drum roll.

DRUM ROLL

..these guys!

Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus,

better known as Cannon Films,

or The Go-Go Boys.

Now, we've met quite a few film-makers so far on this journey,

and I think you'll agree that qualities which seem to bond them

are those of passion, artistry,

social justice and intelligence.

Not so for The Go-Go Boys.

It would be fair to say that they didn't give a shit.

It was all about quantity over quality,

and money, money, money. They were hustlers.

They would come up with the concept for a film -

Charles Bronson as The Golem -

then they would sell that film to exhibitors all over the world.

Rather, they would presell it. There wouldn't even be a script,

and Bronson would have no idea about it.

So, a film would only go into production

if the finance was raised entirely in advance,

and that film would already be in profit.

The Go-Go Boys had made their money,

and the actual making of the film itself was an afterthought.

They couldn't have cared less if the film won Oscars

or was a barely coherent pile of puke.

And boy, did they make some stinkers.

So, what did The Go-Go Boys

have to do with the British film industry?

Well, to understand that, we have to jump back for a moment.

Right from the 1930s,

there were really only two cinema chains in the UK,

Odeon and ABC.

By the '80s, these were owned by Rank and EMI.

Huge organisations,

both of these entities also owned big film studios.

EMI had Elstree Studios and Rank had Pinewood.

This was a nightmare for independent British film producers

and production companies, because it was very hard

to get these monoliths to show films in their cinemas

which they didn't already have a big financial stake in.

If that sounds like an unfair monopoly, it was.

You had to run your movie for one of two people,

a man called Bob Webster, another man called George Pinches.

Weren't bad guys. I preferred Pinches personally,

because I thought he loved cinema more.

If they liked your film, you would get it played.

If they didn't, you wouldn't, and a lot of films never got played.

It was a really, really bizarre situation.

And if you offended either of them, God help you.

I actually had a severe run-in at one point,

and was threatened that my films wouldn't be played any more.

We went to the Competition Commission,

we went to anyone and everyone that would listen.

We never got anywhere at all.

By the mid '80s, both Rank and EMI

had largely wrapped up their film-making arms,

following a pretty disastrous few years.

EMI, then known as Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment

as they were owned by the much larger global conglomerate,

Thorn Electric,

were in real trouble.

It became obvious that Thorn Electric

were going to dump their UK film business.

Their assets amounted to Elstree Studios,

ABC Cinemas, and a large back catalogue of films.

For a moment, it looked like Rupert Murdoch might buy it,

but then...

Cannon came along and Cannon bought EMI.

We moved from a point of actually being quite protective about Cannon

and trying to make sure that the Golan-Globus duo did OK,

to them becoming an even bigger problem.

They would own the largest chain of cinemas in the country,

and since Thatcher's government had recently deregulated the cinemas,

no longer requiring them to exhibit any amount of British releases,

trouble really was in the air.

While all of this was going on, Goldcrest was collapsing.

They had bet big by funding three epic films at the same time.

Absolute Beginners, starring David Bowie,

and directed by Julian Temple, who'd made the Sex Pistols film.

The Mission, starring Robert De Niro,

a period drama set in 18th-century South America.

And Revolution, Hugh Hudson's latest and final epic.

It told the story of a simple fur trapper

who finds himself caught up in the American Revolutionary War.

It starred Al Pacino and this guy, Ricky from EastEnders.

Honestly, it just didn't work.

Not for the critics, not for audiences,

and definitely not for Goldcrest,

who, when the dust settled, lost almost 10 million on the deal.

They were done.

There was nobody left to fund those big, bold British movies.

I stumbled into Goldcrest by producing a film

called Absolute Beginners.

For Goldcrest to be involved in Absolute Beginners

was a very unusual thing,

because they were very much about this kind of idea of Britain

which was, as it is now,

with Downton Abbey and everything else we do,

eminently exportable.

But they had hit a bit of an iceberg in their journey,

and the two icebergs were Revolution and The Mission.

And the budgets were going out of control,

and they were fighting, there was internal squabbling at Goldcrest.

They were basically in trouble.

But Goldcrest had over-invested in the dream.

We've all done it, you know, it's human nature,

that once you've had some success,

you get drawn towards the light like a moth to a flame,

and you think, "OK, well, now I've done that,

"I can do this, because everybody's telling us."

Cos the industry feeds on this kind of odd thing of...

You know, the Oscars in particular,

you get Oscar nominations,

and Goldcrest had so many Oscars, and they'd accumulated this idea

of them being the hit-making machine,

that they got lost in their own mist of success.

It all happened too quickly. I mean, really, in a sense,

Chariots and Gandhi back-to-back

kind of tilted, tilted the ship over,

and it was assuming it could do things,

and hoping it could do things that were never really possible.

So, if Cannon, who admitted they had no interest in making British films,

were to be successful,

such films would be hard to fund,

and even harder to get released.

Cannon WERE successful.

The British government,

ignoring advice from their own Office of Fair Trading,

allowed the deal to go through

without so much as scrutinising the finances of a company

who would now control 40% of Britain's cinema screens.

They also were, I felt, quite suspect blokes.

They were not in it for the sake of the British film industry

or for the greater good.

We were not in safe hands. I mean, I was sure of that.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom.

There was still plenty of life in the British film industry yet.

Alongside the exciting variety of stories starting to emerge

were some new directors with unique vision.

Peter Greenaway is British cinema's artist and philosopher.

To watch one of his films is to be confronted

with the subversion of realism and pretty much everything else.

At times, he uses the screen as a canvas,

or a proscenium, or even a blank page,

to explore seemingly infinite levels of theme and concept.

His career was launched by the support of the BFI production board,

and throughout the '80s, Channel 4 were his de facto patron.

With The Draughtsman's Contract proving that an art film

could be a commercial success,

A Zed andamp; Two Noughts,

The Belly Of An Architect,

Drowning By Numbers,

and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover

were all released within a seven-year period.

Each one of them remaining an engaging, complex

and resonant piece of work.

Bill Forsyth dragged Scottish cinema away

from the parochial representations of the likes of Whisky Galore!

His 1979 debut, That Sinking Feeling,

had been a character-rich contemporary portrait

of Glasgow's wily and witty youth,

centred around a stainless steel sink heist.

Two years later, he made his name with the film Gregory's Girl,

a wistful love story

set in the concrete Scottish new town of Cumbernauld.

Gregory is the titular schoolboy

who falls in love with a girl who joins his football team,

yet finds himself at the mercy of womankind in his pursuit of her.

Again, Forsyth displays an adept hand at creating characters

of great authenticity and deep, warm wit.

The film won him the support of David Puttnam.

And we started chatting, and I had an idea.

I'd cut out from the newspaper an article about this accountant

in... I think it was in the Hebrides,

who had successfully sued an oil company for spillage.

I said, "There's a story here about the relationship

"between communities and oil companies."

We commissioned two journalists,

one on the east coast, one on the west coast of Scotland,

to collect stories, local stories.

And then Bill took this whole kind of collage

and wrote the treatment for what became Local Hero.

Managed to raise the money. Again, wasn't easy.

It was interesting, it was a really wonderful screenplay,

and I'd done Chariots, I thought this was gonna be a piece of...

You know, easy-peasy.

We were struggling,

and went to BAFTA,

and Chariots Of Fire won the BAFTA,

and I walked off the stage,

James Lee, actually, of Goldcrest, stopped me and said,

"Are you still struggling with Local Hero funding?"

I said, "Yeah." He said, "You've got it."

Local Hero is the story of big business and small town.

Another truly '80s story.

A Texan oil executive is sent to a small Scottish village

to buy it, destroy it, and replace it with a refinery.

He finds resistance and eccentricity.

Burt Lancaster lights up the screen as the oil company's owner,

who turns out to have more in common with the villagers

than might have been expected.

The air is good, clear.

Forsyth created a cinematic vision of Scotland which has endured.

Cordial, convivial,

and philosophical in the face of threat.

Although that would go on

to grittier representations in the '90s,

that spirit of humour and poetry that Forsyth defined

would continue to permeate it.

Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish?

It's shite being Scottish!

Since we're talking Scottish cinema of the '80s,

let's just take a moment to appreciate the greatest film

which Bill Forsyth didn't actually direct.

Michael Hoffman's 1985 banger, Restless Natives,

Scotland's missive to Margaret Thatcher,

in which two young men don joke shop masks

and become modern day highwaymen,

robbing rich American tourists of their money,

and redistributing it to the poor.

It's hilarious, sweet, and a damning indictment

of Westminster's dismantling of Scottish industry.

And yes, that is Brian Forbes.

Oh!

Terence Davies from Liverpool

was a discovery of the BFI Production Board as early as 1976.

They used to be a thing on BBC on Friday night called Cinema Now,

and they had one on the BFI Production Board,

so off I sent my script.

And about four months later, I was asked to go down to see them.

And it was run by the wonderful Mamoun Hassan.

I came in, he said, "You have £8,500 and not a penny more.

"You will direct."

I said, "I've never directed before."

He said, "Well, now's your chance."

And I did it, my very first film,

and apart from the cameraman,

they all hated it, the rest of the crew,

and they told me every day how much they hated it.

This is his film,

Distant Voices, Still Lives.

Technically two films,

shot a couple of years apart, but shown together,

which follows the story of a working-class Catholic family

during the 1940s and '50s in Liverpool.

This film's place in the story of British cinema is a strange one.

It was a huge hit with the critics and won a lot of awards,

but never quite made it into the public's consciousness.

The film has so much to say about society,

family, culture, and sexuality.

I needed to make it because my father was extremely violent,

and all these stories I had from my siblings,

I just remember thinking that...

Not even consciously, but it's got to be recorded somehow,

because their suffering had been really prodigious.

You know, if you're gonna have children,

treat them properly, or don't have them at all.

But he was a nutter, and his family were equally...

They were nutters, I tell you.

One of his brothers, Uncle Ted,

and it's in the film, because it was so extraordinary,

he'd come in, he always had a candle,

and he'd switch the electric light off

and say, "I've switched the light off."

SINGSONGY: I don't know whether I'm doing right or wrong.

FROM TV: How's your precious watch?

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

And then blow the candle out.

I was petrified!

The writing and acting is magnificent.

There's Pete Postlethwaite in a career-high.

Eileen!

Clean it up!

Over the years, Distant Voices, Still Lives

has come to be recognised within the industry

as one of the greatest British films ever made,

and Davies one of our most respected film-makers.

But it's still somehow a relatively obscure film.

I wish I'd had a talent that was populist,

cos I really do... It is a talent,

and it's one I don't possess, I wish I did.

But I don't.

And the problem with whichever stream you go into,

mainstream or art...

You know, what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity.

What lies at the bottom of the arts scene? Obscurantism.

You know?

It would take a very special film-maker to convince Sean Connery

of this costume choice.

And that very special film-maker was John Boorman.

Born in England and trained at the BBC documentary unit in Bristol,

Boorman's cinema career began in Hollywood,

where he spent the end of the '60s and most of the '70s

directing highly successful films.

His films from this period are Hollywood classics Point Blank,

Hell In The Pacific,

and Deliverance.

Even his more confusing films -

the deeply reviled Exorcist II,

and the absolutely wonderfully bonkers Zardoz -

are regarded as cult classics in their own right.

It wasn't until the '80s that Boorman returned to Britain,

and here, he made two hugely significant films.

Excalibur was a lush, dreamlike epic,

committing the Arthurian legend to film.

The cast featured faces that would go on to great familiarity.

Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and...

Look at that! Liam Neeson bringing

a very particular set of skills to the role of Sir Gawain.

And yes, that is Nicol Williamson as Merlin.

Six years later, Boorman would return to Britain

to make Hope And Glory,

his most personal, autobiographical film,

and one of the definitive works on the wartime experience

of London during The Blitz.

11-year-old Sebastian Rice-Edwards,

who, incredibly, never acted on the screen again,

ably carries the whole film.

Boorman presents a glorious cinematic vision

of wartime suburban London.

The abominations of the enemy!

Of bomb shelters,

bomb sites,

prisoners of war,

American GIs,

absent fathers,

evacuation and, memorably...

German jam. It's German jam.

It's hard to think of another film-maker who quite so successfully

invigorated the film scenes of Hollywood and Great Britain.

From the horrors of war to the horrors of... horror.

The legendary Hammer film company

had had a disastrous 1970s.

Their horror output was too campy

to keep up with the tastes of its audience.

When they have to compete with The Exorcist,

and they have to compete with Texas Chainsaw Massacre,

and suddenly, like, Horror Of Frankenstein

isn't quite as sexy and exciting.

At the press conference for The Satanic Rites Of Dracula,

Christopher Lee declared the film fatuous, pointless and absurd.

In 1979, they went into liquidation,

and took the bulk of British horror film output with them.

Britain continued to be somewhat of a player in the global genre scene,

but it took an American film-maker

to make what many still consider to be

one of the greatest British horror films ever made.

Hot off his success directing

two of America's biggest comedy films of all time,

National Lampoon's Animal House

and The Blues Brothers,

director John Landis was pretty much given carte blanche

by the studio to make his dream project.

What do you think was wrong?

An American Werewolf In London walks the very fine line

between horror and comedy,

and manages to be the most memorable of both.

Help me! Please!

A modern retelling of the werewolf myth,

it somehow illustrates the full spectrum of national stereotypes.

That's enough!

From the grim, dim, superstitious

working-class pub dwellers of the North of England,

to the ludicrous businessman who reprimands the eponymous creature

with the line...

I can assure you that this is not in the least bit amusing.

We see a variety of ineffectual policing methods

from the investigating officers.

Everyone, from dinner party poshos in Hampstead

to Thames-side tramps, become victims.

There. Mary, mother of God!

What's going on here?

And when the beast ultimately emerges in Piccadilly Circus...

..it seems to be British driving which claims the most lives.

Less amusing, but utterly engaging,

was author Clive Barker's directorial debut, Hellraiser.

Could there be a more 1980s story than that of Frank,

a hedonist in search of the ultimate sensory experience

who solves a puzzle box,

only to be ripped apart by hooks from within it?

It'll get through.

When his brother's family inherit the house,

an accidental spill of blood allows Frank to escape

from the hellish dimension he's been trapped in,

but he needs more blood to rebuild his human form.

Aaargh!

His lover, also his sister-in-law, helps him to this end.

But his niece and a group of interdimensional demons,

the Cenobites, led by the iconic Pinhead,

are on to the lovers' plan,

and will do all in their power to stop them.

Hellraiser is so sort of unique and specific,

and its aesthetic is so surprising and shocking,

and just even one look at the poster

and you're like, "Wow, what is that?"

I watched that movie again recently, and it's a low-budget movie,

but it's like... It shows you,

when somebody has, like, an idea that is just,

in its own sort of modest way, perfectly executed,

it will just kind of travel the world over.

And everybody knows that film, everybody knows that poster,

and most people who are horror fans have seen that movie,

because it's like Clive Barker, kind of like, hit on an aesthetic,

and some creature designs which are undeniable.

35 years later, they're still making sequels,

and Pinhead has a place amongst the pantheon

of international cinema's scariest antiheroes.

Do you see, my Lord?

Ken Russell turned his hand to horror during the '80s,

offering us a nightmarish telling

of the night Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein,

in Gothic.

And then offering us something very silly

in The Lair Of The White Worm,

where we were given an early glimpse at the joy

of a firmly tongue-in-cheek Hugh Grant performance.

And yes, that is Doctor Who.

Since we're talking about Doctor Who, as well we should,

in 1986, a man who would, like Peter Capaldi,

go on to play the Doctor,

was about to cut his teeth in a very British film.

When Bruce Robinson consolidated Withnail andamp; I,

his autobiographical tale of Byronic drunken squalor,

from a novel into a screenplay,

there was really only one company

quirky enough to bring it to the screen.

By then, Handmade were on uncertain ground.

Despite early success, they had been stung by two big budget films

which had been massive failures.

The Caribbean-set Water,

starring Michael Caine and Billy Connolly,

and the legendary flop Shanghai Surprise, starring Madonna

and her then-husband Sean Penn.

On both of these productions,

George Harrison had personally got involved

and tried to solve problems practically.

He assembled an all-star band for one sequence in Water,

and recorded an entire unreleased soundtrack for Shanghai Surprise.

But both were expensive and damaging lessons for Handmade.

Although they immediately embraced and funded Withnail,

Harrison's business partner, Denis O'Brien,

was anxious, and proved to be a consistent thorn in the side

to first-time director Robinson.

Luckily, Robinson was not one to be dictated to.

Withnail andamp; I is one of the most perfectly British films ever made.

And as such, is greatly beloved around these parts.

It's clever and poetic and grim and grimy,

and abso-fucking-lutely hilarious.

What is it? What have you found?

Matter.

The 1960s-set tale of two young bohemians

impoverished to the point of squalor

and drunk to the point of destruction...

Even the wankers on the sidewalk wouldn't drink that.

That's worse than meths. Nonsense.

This is a far superior drink to meths.

The wankers don't drink it because they can't afford it.

..bickering over the inanities of their lives,

whilst a progression of awful, distinctly British characters

drift through their world,

offering distraction and frustration.

Very foolish words, man.

Halfway through the film,

they disastrously decide to go on holiday,

and managed to show the riotous horror of rural squalor

alongside urban.

The film's genius is in the final act reveal

that it is not in fact a comedy, but a tragedy,

and that their trajectory is not a shared one.

They want me to play the lead.

And before we know it, we're crying instead of laughing,

because somehow,

we've fallen completely in love with these characters,

and had not considered the reality of their situation.

I shall miss you, Withnail.

There is no other film quite like Withnail andamp; I.

It is staggering to realise that it is the cinematic debut

of not only the director, but also both lead actors.

Withnail andamp; I isn't just a great film because it's funny,

cos it is hilariously funny,

but it was contemporary, it was of its time.

He tapped into an ethos that was very much a part of that time.

It had a difficult release.

Handmade had no idea how to market or strategise its distribution,

and it took almost a decade of word-of-mouth

and videotape proliferation to achieve the recognition it deserved,

and status as a bona fide classic of British cinema.

I remember it coming out.

But it wasn't playing at a cinema anywhere near me.

I'm sure it didn't have that wide a release at all.

So, I probably saw clips of it on TV

and thought, "That looks interesting."

And then you had to wait, like, three years,

until it shows up on VHS.

So, then I think when it shows on VHS,

and then when it's on TV,

then, like, the word-of-mouth starts to spread.

It's so quotable that it borders on being

one of those films that's a bit like somebody

making you sit down and listen to a record.

You know, like, when people are annoying, like,

"Oh, my God, you gotta listen to this!"

It's a little bit like that,

but the good thing is it lives up to the hype.

When it was released, The Daily Telegraph review said,

"In many ways,

"Withnail andamp; I is what the British film industry is all about.

"It is an eccentric, intimate and well-written independent production

"that would never have seen the light of day in Hollywood."

I guess it's just something about it kind of completely just solidifies

your image of the British eccentric.

It feels like it's so kind of against the odds.

Everything about it, it so could have easily not been made at all.

And that's why I think it's like a weird anomaly

that sort of just creeped into the national consciousness.

So, it's a really interesting case study,

of, like, it is a real cult film,

because now it's like whenever they have a poll

of the greatest British movies of all time,

Withnail andamp; I is right up there, like, sometimes even at number one.

Sadly, the belated success of Withnail

was not enough to save Handmade.

The company limped on for a few more years,

but 1990's Nuns On The Run

ended their run on a familiar note to which they'd started,

with Eric Idle dressed as a woman.

But a notably less successful one.

The company had made some terrible investments,

and George Harrison was the one who had ended up

literally paying for it.

A noted advocate for peace and love,

he spent the next six years in court,

trying to sue his erstwhile business partner.

Goldcrest was gone,

and Palace Pictures' days were numbered.

The history of British cinema has always been

insufficient capital to fulfil its ambitions,

and fulfil the ambitions of its talent.

The one thing this country has done

is produced way more than its fair share of talent.

Oh, and as for the massive threat posed by Cannon films,

same deal, karma caught up with them.

Their entire business model was a wreck.

They were massively in debt,

and as their films performed worse and worse,

their stock value rapidly bottomed out.

Within six months of monopolising the British film industry,

they were stripping their own assets for sale in terrible deals.

Cannon got sold to an Italian conglomerate,

and Golan and Globus became sideline figures.

They never achieved the respect they felt they deserved

as industry behemoths,

and even now, remain the punchline of 1980s cinema.

Like so many other stories from the 1980s,

the story of the British film industry at that time

is one of money,

excitement,

power and greed.

I'll kill him and I'll eat him!

It's the story of passionate people who adored film,

tried something bold,

reaped the reward,

and then clamoured for more.

Of an excited rush to finally build a strong national infrastructure

and produce great big British movies,

and also just great little films.

A little bit more than an 'otdog, know what I mean?

It's the story of when little old Britain puffed out its chest

an showed the world that we were every bit as capable as Hollywood.

And do you know what?

It worked.

In those ten years,

we turned out a slew of impressive,

lyrical,

heartfelt,

progressive,

complex, funny,

ground-breaking, heartbreaking,

fucking brilliant films,

which are still cherished and enjoyed

all around the world to this day.

We've gone on holiday by mistake!

But more than that, it's also the story of quixotic failure,

of dreams over reality.

You don't like me much, do you, ma'am?

Of heart over wallets, and of expansion beyond capability.

Ultimately, it was hubris that toppled them all.

But how dare we judge or smirk?

It was that hubris which gave us a decade of stunning cinema

which we're still enjoying to this day.

Channel 4 would continue to produce diverse, enlightening

and socially engaged smaller films,

but we had lost the craziness,

the huge epics, the eccentric comedies,

and the gonzo fantasies which had only just started to emerge.

From the ashes of the 1980s,

we would see a surprising return to strength

for the British film industry in the 1990s.

Lucky devils.

But it would not be the same.

Lessons had been learned, and caution would be exercised,

and never again would we see such a level of beautiful eccentricity

on the screen or in the boardroom.

I'm gonna be a star!

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