Original subtitles

NICK HELM: Although the Government under Margaret Thatcher

had done very little to support British filmmaking,

it could be said that for a solid decade

Margaret Thatcher herself had fuelled it.

So many of the stories

told on British screens by British creatives

were either a commentary on, or a reaction to, her policies

and their effects on the people of the United Kingdom.

In late 1990, having finally gone too far with her poll tax policy,

she had lost the support of the country and her own cabinet.

Here she is getting stabbed in the back by Giles out of Buffy,

and, er, Richard E Grant.

Hang on, that's not Maggie, it's Meryl Streep.

This is 2011's The Iron Lady.

The story of Maggie Thatcher

as told by the director of Mamma Mia.

Right up.

It's a mad, mad, mad, weird film,

in which we're invited to view old Mags

as both a figure to be admired

and an object worthy of our greatest sympathy.

Here she is buying a pint of milk.

How much is the milk? Oh, 49 pence.

And here she is being visited by the ghost of her husband.

Margaret.

And, yes, he is doing a racially insensitive joke.

It is bizarre. Feet.

Anyway, by the end of 1990, Thatcher was gone.

What would happen to British film?

As we reach our final episode,

perhaps it's time to assess what British film had become

since the end of the 1950s.

It can be hard to articulate,

especially when talking so generally,

the things that set British cinema apart from Hollywood.

But in 1990, two films were released about almost the same thing.

One was American, the other British.

By looking at them closely, we can get a unique view

about how our culture, filmic and otherwise,

offers certain things Hollywood has never been able to.

Those films are Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Both films are about women who have recently lost their male partners.

In both films, the women grieve,

and in both films, the men return to them

in the form of ghosts.

Ghost's ghost is Sam, played by Patrick Swayze,

a successful businessman

with sculpted hair and a perfect body.

Truly, Madly, Deeply's ghost is Jamie, played by Alan Rickman,

a classical musician, his hair is also rather nice,

but his looks are more on the ordinary side

and he hides his body in a big, warm coat.

Sam was shot to death in an apparent mugging.

Jamie died during routine surgery.

Molly, played by Demi Moore,

mourns silently, beautifully, with single tears.

Nina, played by Juliet Stevenson,

is loud and snotty and hurt and furious.

Molly lives in a beautiful, huge loft in New York.

Nina lives in a rat-infested, poky little flat in Highgate.

Each have a scene in which we see their love and connection,

both set to famous pop songs.

In Ghost, iconically, the scene is about sensuality

and physical connection.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply,

it's about frivolity and the connection of two souls.

Your eyes

Sam is a literal ghost. He passes through objects

and can't be seen or heard by Molly.

Nina can see, hear and touch Jamie.

It's not made clear whether others can't,

or if he just hides when they're around.

I want the world to go away.

Sam goes on a mission to learn how to contact Molly.

Jamie stays at home and watches videos with his friends.

In Ghost, the story is of the uncovering

and avenging of Sam's murder.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply, it's a slower and less defined narrative,

which perhaps is only revealed at the end.

At the end of Ghost, the murder is solved,

justice is served upon those responsible,

and Sam gets to move on,

yet we feel that Molly's real grieving has yet to begin.

In Truly, Madly, Deeply, Jamie quietly leaves

when he can see that Nina's grieving is over,

and it's time for HER to move on.

It's only then that we realise his mission wasn't closure

or vengeance, it was guidance.

Ghost is Sam's story. Truly, Madly, Deeply is Nina's.

Ghost's success perhaps lies in

its commitment to rigid story structure,

to the high stakes, to the classic beauty of its stars,

to the cinematic fantasy of the spectral.

Truly, Madly, Deeply is different.

It's meandering and conversational,

it has actors rather than stars,

and everything about the world they inhabit is modest and mundane.

Thank you for missing me.

Its success is in its utter lack of fantasy.

It's in its honesty and relatability.

I'm not saying either film is better than the other.

In some ways, they're impossible to compare,

but you can see that there's a cinematic language

to Truly, Madly, Deeply which is inherently British.

A modesty, a wry humour... Change legs.

..a fearlessness to address the ugly and the deep...

My feet will want to march to where you are sleeping.

But I shall go on living.

..and a distaste for inauthenticity.

Ghost was written by a brilliant screenwriter,

Bruce Joel Rubin,

who went on to explore death in greater depth in two films

very different from Ghost, Jacob's Ladder and My Life.

Truly, Madly, Deeply was the writing-directing debut

of Anthony Minghella,

and in some ways, Minghella's own story

exemplifies the modern history of British cinema.

Like the angry young men of pre-cinema,

he started in theatre.

Like many of the new wave, he had cut his teeth in TV,

writing on Grange Hill, Boon, Inspector Morse

and Jim Henson's The Storyteller.

He became a successful writer of radio drama.

Like My Beautiful Laundrette,

Truly, Madly, Deeply was made as a film to be shown on TV,

but was escalated to a cinema release.

Like so many others, he was courted by Hollywood,

and he went on to great success.

The English Patient is now considered

really one of the last great British historical epics.

It won him the Best Director Oscar.

He would go on to adapt The Talented Mr Ripley

and make one more epic, 2003's Cold Mountain,

before dying at the age of just 54.

In some ways, he would prove to be the last of his breed.

Things would change in the 1990s. Here's what happened.

Three directors, all white men, but interesting white men.

At the end of the 1980s, all three were embarking upon

what looked to be fascinating careers.

That's Alex Cox. His career started with a bang.

A young Englishman in America, he makes a short, surreal film

inspired by the associative editing styles

of Lindsay Anderson and Nic Roeg.

The film finds its way to ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith,

and he sets Cox up with a film deal at Universal.

Cox's subsequent feature debut is the now cult classic Repo Man.

But upon release in '84, it was considered a failure.

Cox returns to England and makes Sid And Nancy,

an ugly, funny, beautiful, painful biopic

of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

He manages to convincingly capture

the energy of punk rock on celluloid,

thanks in large part to Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb's

fearless performances.

He follows this up with a bizarre spaghetti western pastiche,

largely populated by British punk and new wave stars.

Joe Strummer, The Pogues, Elvis Costello, even Grace Jones.

A film like no other from a filmmaker like no other.

This is Paperhouse.

An 11-year-old girl, ill in bed, draws a house.

In her dreams, she is transported there.

Not quite a film for children, yet not quite a horror film.

Not quite real, not quite surreal. ALARM CLOCK RINGS

Ultimately, Paperhouse is a cinematic experience

which defies explanation and categorisation.

And it's brilliant.

It was the feature film debut of Bernard Rose.

Two years later, fantasy and reality flirt dangerously

in the 1940-set Chicago Joe And The Showgirl.

OK.

And two years on, dreams and reality are again at the heart

of Rose's most famous film, Candyman.

Candyman.

'Turn out the lights.'

SCREAMING

As we've seen previously,

the attitude towards sex in the modern history of British cinema

has not always been very sophisticated,

and yet the issue of British sexuality

is a fascinating one.

David Leland's first feature film script,

directed by Terry Jones, was Personal Services.

Based on the true life story of Cynthia Payne,

a single mother who realises that there's money to be made

in providing bespoke sexual services to an upper class clientele.

The film is, of course, a comedy of manners,

an askewering or notions of British morals and class.

But it's also a film which acknowledges

the wide spectrum of sexuality

and challenges the notion of deviancy.

ALL: Sex!

I briefly met Cynthia Payne on my way out of my agent's office

because she had Cynthia Payne coming in with a couple of producers

to talk about making a film based on her book, the biography.

And Jenne Casarotto, my agent, gave me the book,

and I said hello to Cynthia on my way out.

And the first thing she ever said to me, she says,

"Ah, you see, shy one. It's always the shy ones."

And, er, from there it evolved.

What I did with Cynthia Payne,

and I think what other people didn't do,

was I spent a lot of time with her at her house.

On one visit, she said, "Do you want a cup of tea?

"Come on, come into the kitchen and I'll make you a cup of tea."

And we went into the kitchen,

this was after an hour of not offering me anything,

er, went into the kitchen,

and, er, when I went in there,

there was a man kneeling on the floor,

dressed as a French maid.

When it was time for Leland to direct his own first film,

he once again looked to the story of Cynthia Payne,

but this time told a story inspired by her sexual awakening.

Do you like my suspenders?

When Margaret Matheson moved to Zenith,

she, er, commissioned me to write the screenplay

for what became Personal Services.

And I started to write, and I went back to childhood.

And once I had got, like, 25, 30 pages into it,

I sent it to her,

and said, "Look, this is how far I've got."

I said, "We'll be lucky if I get to the end of the screenplay."

And that maybe she might've been on the game by then,

but it'd be at the end of the screenplay.

And Margaret said, "Well, we want Cynthia on the game."

And I said, "Well, this is where I'm at

"in the story of Cynthia as a child.

"I know exactly where it's going. I'd like to finish that first."

She said, "Well, finish it and we'll put it on the shelf."

And then write what turned out to be Personal Services,

which I did.

But I actually wrote Wish You Were Here first.

So when Personal Services was over,

then we took Wish You Were Here off the shelf.

I said, "And I want to direct it."

Wish You Were Here is a film British to its core.

There's something wrong with you, my girl. I'm bloody bored.

Language.

Its teenage star, Emily Lloyd, arrived on the screen fully formed,

with a defiant cry of... Up your bum!

And she should be one of Britain's biggest film stars today.

That's good. But she's not.

And Leland, Rose and Cox

should be three of Britain's most lauded filmmakers today.

They all went on to have fascinating careers

and produce respected work,

but they have struggled to attract the budgets or attention

that their talents really deserve.

They remain relatively obscure to this day.

The early films of these directors, which showed so much promise,

Personal Services, Sid And Nancy, Paperhouse,

Straight To Hell, Chicago Joe And The Showgirl,

and Wish You Were Here all had something in common.

They were produced by a very important group of people.

Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe,

who had also produced early works by Derek Jarman and Stephen Frears,

became the production force known as Working Title Films.

The point about Tim and Eric was that they felt as if they were

a great big jolt of new energy

and they were sort of first in the field.

If certain people

looked like they were interested in certain things,

then they would see whether they could get it made.

Now, remember in the last episode

when I told you about all of those production companies

producing all of those brilliant films in the 1980s,

and how they had all gone bust by 1992?

Well, I left one out.

Working Title was one of the best.

And they most certainly didn't go bust.

They produced fantastic, diverse stories of British culture,

made by emerging directors with unique voices and visions.

They seemed to have an unerring eye for talent

and a commitment to quality.

And then something happened.

Right at the time their contemporaries

were hitting the wall,

Working Title received an offer they couldn't refuse from PolyGram,

a global behemoth entertainment company.

PolyGram could see the value in Working Title's ability

to produce high-quality films on lower budgets,

and they put together a deal

in which they would buy up 51% of the company,

and, in return, would fund all of Working Title's projects

AND look after the global distribution.

To have guaranteed funding and distribution in place

on a small film is more than just a rarity.

One concession that Working Title had to make

was to introduce a systemised production routine.

This included a formal assessment of the commerciality

and the profitability of any proposed project.

Working Title was now an international concern

and the films they produced in the early '90s reflected this.

Some of the films were set in the US,

like Drop Dead Fred and Bob Roberts.

'Bob Roberts announced his candidacy

'for the US Senate seat in Pennsylvania.'

Some brought Hollywood stars to shoot in the UK,

like The Young Americans.

Let's take a look at The Young Americans.

It's an interesting film as it was one of the rare occasions

in which a British team tried to make a big cop movie

in the American mould.

Harvey Keitel plays a New York detective sent to London

to catch Viggo Mortensen as an American crook

taking root in the British underworld.

How'd you like London?

Same shit, different town.

I'm going back to Los Angeles.

It was written and directed by first-timer Danny Cannon.

A year later, Shopping,

the feature film debut of writer-director Paul W S Anderson,

was released.

Wanker!

A slick, loud, futuristic action film, also set in London,

in which Jude Law, in his film debut,

leads a gang of young criminals in what the poster describes as

"a reckless orgy of destruction".

Hardware is a post-apocalyptic action film,

made in London by yet another debut writer-director,

Richard Stanley.

It sees a government-commissioned killer robot

attempt a murder spree in a futuristic slum.

All three of these films stood out as ambitious projects,

made by directors keen to break the chains

of traditional British cinema.

It seemed like all three owed a debt to Ridley Scott.

Scott, from South Shields, had been an advertising contemporary

of David Puttnam, Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson,

but his film career was almost instantly a Hollywood one.

Alien, Blade Runner, Legend, Thelma andamp; Louise, Gladiator.

Some of these films might have been shot in British studios,

but the British film industry holds no claim over Ridley.

However, ten years after his debut,

his influence was being felt at home.

Hardware, Shopping and The Young Americans

were bold debuts from first-time filmmakers.

Made in Britain but clearly aimed at the global multiplex audience,

all three of these filmmakers were swiftly summoned to Hollywood.

Danny Cannon, for his second film, found himself at the helm

of the hugely-budgeted blockbuster Judge Dredd,

starring box office king Sylvester Stallone.

The film was a critical and commercial failure.

Paul W S Anderson had more commercial success in film.

His Hollywood debut was the movie adaptation

of the video game Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat!

And he went on to a career

largely dominated by videogame adaptations

and reboots of older film franchises.

He also made Event Horizon,

which was a stunning piece of sci-fi horror.

Richard Stanley wound up at the helm

of the big-budget Hollywood remake of The Island Of Dr Moreau,

starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.

The production was troubled

and Stanley was fired after only a few days' shooting.

All three directors, like the trio from the start of this episode,

have gone on to have long careers,

but not in the British film industry,

and not making the kind of films

that their debuts might have promised.

So what happened?

What stopped a generation of visionary British filmmakers,

and commercially ambitious British filmmakers,

from building long and illustrious careers

within the British film industry?

Well, er, I really feel, erm, in short,

to recap slightly in a clearer version,

the words of David Cassidy, in fact,

while he was still with The Partridge Family.

This man. Hugh... John...

Well, I think we can...

..Mungo... Grant.

Yes. Important to have said it, I think.

Of course, it's not at all fair to lay the blame

of a general tide change in British cinema

squarely at one man's feet.

Especially a man who has spent so much of his career

being quite honest about the accidental nature of his career

AND his general disenchantment with it.

But his was very much the face of the zeitgeist.

His acting career started as a bit of fun

whilst he studied English literature at Oxford.

Here is his first screen appearance in Privileged,

a film made at that time.

He was soon drawn into the world of legitimate screen acting.

In James Ivory's 1987 adaptation of E M Forster's Maurice,

Grant played the young man who turned his back on his true love

to embrace the more socially acceptable life

of the heteronormative.

It was a measured and subtle performance,

and opened the gates for his more recognisable role

as self-centred but charming toff.

And carve the beast...

He showed his tongue-in-cheek comic talents

in Ken Russell's gloriously silly The Lair Of The White Worm.

I hear you're having trouble with a snake.

You must be from the council, then.

And took a lead role in Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon.

He then took a smaller role

in James Ivory's hugely successful The Remains Of The Day,

all of which stood him in good stead when casting began

for the lead role in this film.

Richard is all word jokes.

If you are going to get the best out of his script,

then what you're going to do is to respect the words.

I don't know how many we saw. We saw a lot of people.

Erm, and Hugh popped up and he could say the words.

Hi.

You look perfect. You... In fact, you probably are perfect.

Well, how are you?

He's a very clever man, terrifically hardworking,

and he rehearses his arse off.

Four Weddings And A Funeral had a budget of just £2.2 million,

and it brought in returns of over 245 million quid.

It made an instant global star of Hugh Grant,

and an unimaginably vast pile of cash

for Working Title and PolyGram.

I was simply in my agent's outer office one day,

and I was kind of poking around on his desk

seeing, you know, what's around, what are the titles?

And his assistant pointed to one, which was Four Weddings,

and she says, "That's really funny."

It was one of those scripts

which had been on the back of the shelf for a very long time,

and you could see multiple people's coffee stains on the front cover.

And I took it away and I read it, and it was indeed really funny.

There was a perceived problem that we might piss the audience off.

Was the audience actually going to put up with these posh boys?

Certainly, I felt that, I think Duncan Kenworthy felt that,

that we would have been mortified if that had been left alone,

and so we went to work on talking that down.

Erm, and that got into the casting,

we made sure that that was part of the casting.

Erm, Richard did a certain amount of rewriting,

and all of it was just pulling it back from that edge,

and we had a wonderful casting director.

And we got all sorts of...

eccentric people to come in

and, erm, and be in it,

and it blossomed under that eccentricity.

It's called Four Weddings And A Funeral

and the funeral was set in a very gritty,

ugly part of

the very furthest south of London down the Thames.

And you could feel people going, "Oh!"

because it had all been girls and flowers up to that point.

I thought that love would last forever.

I was wrong.

We got the actors to come in and see it.

There they were and nobody was saying anything.

Nobody was laughing, nobody was responding.

And we all thought, "Well, it's an absolute disaster."

Except that Andie MacDowell fell off her chair

every five seconds.

She thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

The man with the influence was a man called Russell Schwartz.

It was he who said we should open this movie

in the States and not in England.

And we said, "Why?" And he said, "Because England will dead-ball it.

"They will simply say this is too simple,

"this is vulgar, this is just, erm...

"this is just making people laugh. It's nothing. Where's the pain?"

He, erm, opened it in New York,

erm, and it was immediately successful,

and then they opened it in this country.

Had it been the other way round, you'd never have heard of it.

It was becoming clear that there was a place for British cinema

on the international stage.

But it might not have been what we would have all

chosen for ourselves.

Hugh Grant and Working Title

established a cinematic representation of Britain,

both contemporary and historical,

which was far more acceptable to the rest of the world

than the diverse political and complex one

that had started to emerge on our screens in the '80s.

In this alternative Britain,

we were all either wealthy, self-deprecating

and, in a word, lovely,

or delightful, earthy, simple folk,

untroubled by notions of institutionalised privilege.

Richard Curtis, the writer of Four Weddings,

would go on to create his own cinematic universe,

based apparently upon his perception and experience of love.

'If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling

'you'll find that love actually IS all around.'

It was this unique vision

which would make him a very wealthy man.

Richard always knew that there was a broad highway

in front of him,

down which he marched with great success.

Maybe one of the things

that we had to nail down and take seriously

was that we should not be scared of success.

On his next collaboration with Hugh Grant, Notting Hill,

a film critic from The Independent pointed out,

"Only Curtis could write a movie about Notting Hill,

"London's most diverse borough,

"and not feature a single Black face in it."

A feature of all of Curtis's films seems to be

that the characters have relatively humble jobs,

yet live in comparative opulence and a general carefree state

in which matters of the heart can be their main concern.

In his romantic opus Love Actually...

Natalie.

..Curtis even casts Hugh Grant as the Prime Minister,

who puts the feelings of the Downing Street tea girl

far above that of international diplomacy.

It's a strange view of romance,

both charming in its naivety and offensive in its simplicity.

But it is beloved at home and abroad.

When my daughter, who is in the trade,

wishes to torment me, she'll say,

"Ooh, I'm going to watch my favourite film tonight."

And I say, "What's that, then, darling?"

And she'll say, "Love Actually."

And that twists a knife in my liver, I can't tell you.

And the huge amounts of money generated by Curtis

and his association with Working Title Films

should doubtless be enough to silence

even the most vehement critic.

Alongside Curtis's talent for writing truly profitable romance

is his talent for writing really profitable slapstick.

Back in his university days,

one of Curtis's earliest creative partnerships

was with the rubber-faced comedian Rowan Atkinson.

Atkinson is an undeniably talented comic force,

and Blackadder, his series co-written by Curtis,

remains some of the sharpest and wittiest social satire

in British TV history.

PHONE RINGS

Hello. The Somme Public Baths.

No running, shouting or piddling in the shallow end.

But they also concocted another character,

a largely silent comical character called Mr Bean.

Bean.

Bean is Atkinson's id,

his clown, his fool, a stupid man in a suit.

He borrows from Jacques Tati,

but tends to dial down on the subtlety.

One man's plagiarism is another man's tribute.

He also owes more than a small debt of influence

to Harpo Marx. And Buster Keaton.

Yet, for many, Bean manages to capture

none of the charm of these characters.

He is a tetchy, smug and annoying idiot,

who endlessly, painfully, mugs for the camera.

Curtis and Atkinson made two Mr Bean feature films together.

Combined, the films grossed almost half a billion quid

in global box office takings.

Half a fucking billion.

THIS guy.

So we might as well just pack up and go home, really.

When you combine what mid-'90s Working Title had concocted

with the global thirst that Goldcrest had whipped up

for big period dramas,

you can see that British film had finally found its place

in global cinema.

Posh people falling in love, both modern and historical,

against a highly-sanitised,

aesthetically charming vision of the UK,

which has never existed.

And for some reason which continues to elude me,

Mr Bean. The end. Right.

Period drama was not a new genre for British cinema.

British filmmakers had explored the historical

and re-enacted it pretty much since cinema began.

Merchant Ivory Productions had been producing a wide array

of feature films, short films and documentaries

globally since the '60s.

Their work was widely seen and respected,

but it wasn't until the '90s

that they would establish a genre which would become a formula.

The double whammy of Howards End in 1992

and The Remains Of The Day in 1993

were both adaptations of popular books.

Both featured the British stiff upper lip

being challenged by a woman of independent spirit,

and both featured Emma Thompson as that woman of spirit.

She would go on, two years later, to win the Best Screenplay Oscar

and a Best Actress nomination

for her adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel Sense And Sensibility.

The film was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar that year,

and the following year, The English Patient won the award.

Featuring a largely British cast and a British director,

Minghella's epic had been released by the ambitious US company Miramax.

In 1998, all of the Best Picture Oscar nominations

were historical dramas.

The winner, Shakespeare In Love,

was produced by the primarily US-based Universal

and distributed by Miramax.

Miramax also distributed nominee Life Is Beautiful.

Third nominee Elizabeth was a Working Title film.

Since Four Weddings in '94,

the closest thing to a contemporary-set British film

even to be nominated for an Academy Award

was The Queen in 2006.

It was set in 1997, and despite being excellent

and however much we all love our Queen,

it was hardly a representation of modern British life.

And by the way, the last time BAFTA gave Best Picture

to a contemporary-set British film

was for The Full Monty. So... 25 years.

25 years.

25 soul-crushing years of big houses...

..bigger houses,

and really, really big houses.

All staffed by simple poor people,

who seem to consider it a great honour

to live a life of servitude... Me?

..to a predictable roll-call of brooding fluffy-haired young men

romancing plucky and defiant young ladies...

..against the wishes of meddling old spinsters...

And then I will strike him.

..and fearsome old patriarchs.

There are the tears of repressed romance,

the unbridled thrill of the writing, delivery and receiving of letters...

..and, oh, the dances.

The whirling dances.

So much whirling.

The eyes meeting across the room,

the burning stares from the onlookers...

..and more fucking whirling.

Then there's the inevitable appearance

from a member of the Royal Family.

Paging Judi Dench.

And, of course,

the historical ubiquity of Helena Bonham Carter,

who, in a career spanning 40 years,

appears to only have escaped the bodice a handful of times.

Not that she's the only one.

This genre has done more for the paying off of mortgages

of the same small company of faces than anything else.

Apart from the Harry Potter franchise,

which hoovered them all up and gave them a decade of employment.

Even if not on a wide international level,

there were still other representations

of British culture coming through in the '90s.

Although Mike Leigh was well known for his TV plays and theatre work

stretching back to the '70s,

in the '90s, he came into his own cinematically.

His body of work is so distinctive as to be instantly recognisable,

yet each film is fresh and distinct from the others.

First of all, I spent a decade making original work in the theatre.

I was on to film, erm, early on.

Then couldn't, thus didn't, make a film

for a whole number of years

until we made Bleak Moments at the beginning of the 1970s,

which was a feature film.

Then Tony Garnett got me into the BBC

and I started to make a whole series of films for television.

Leith's films are the product

of intense periods of rehearsal and collaboration with his actors,

who are given great latitude to improvise and build

not only their characters

but the narrative of the film itself.

My whole journey has been based on

a very strong sense of richness and potential

of collaboration with everybody involved.

And what's evolved, and evolved very early on,

is to gather together a cast,

and to create characters and explore characters

and to develop relationships

all through discussion and improvisation,

always spending months and months before the shoot,

so that we're then able to go out on location,

erm, scene by scene, sequence by sequence,

drawing on what we've prepared,

but then defining the actual material.

You go to a potential backer and you say,

"I can't tell you anything about it. I can't tell you who's in it.

"Give us the money and we'll make a film."

And it's quite straightforward. There's only two things that happen.

Either they say, "Great. Fantastic. Go for it."

Or they tell us to fuck off.

And the latter has happened more times than the former.

I made three films

that I've always said retrospectively

you could lump together as being political.

Meantime, which came directly out of a reaction

to unemployment under Thatcher.

Four Days In July, a BBC film, the last BBC film I made,

which was about Northern Ireland, very much about the troubles.

And High Hopes, which talks about politics,

and is about a guy trying to resolve his political conscience.

But they are not...

I mean, they were reflections rather than polemics.

I also would suggest that I've never made a film

that wasn't in a sense political,

in that they are about how we live and how people relate,

and power and all the rest of it.

If the films of the '80s reflected Thatcher's Britain,

Mike Leigh's films of the '90s held a mirror up to society

and then shook it angrily in her face.

What do you think about Margaret Thatcher?

Do you think she WILL be assassinated?

Or do you think she will carry on ad nauseam into the next century?

He's been accused of patronising

the working and lower middle classes,

but he articulates their humanity and their situation.

And all of the types of people

Thatcher seemed to either pretend didn't exist or lambasted

were elevated by Leigh to a position of empathy and beauty.

Or not quite beauty, something.

You're superb.

Ken Loach, who, since Kes,

had largely spent the '80s working in TV,

also worked prodigiously in the cinema during this period.

I think the cinema should be diverse,

you know, genuinely diverse.

But don't build in a class bias, that's all.

You know, don't have a subtext

that says normality is to be middle class

and to be the comic servant, or the crook or whatever,

is to be working class, you know? Let's not have those stereotypes.

We'd say we just tried to tell stories of

working-class experience, either contemporary experience,

or, erm, stories from the past

when there have been critical moments

when a light would shine

on the key interests

and major actors in a story.

Many of his films demonstrate

how a decent hardworking person of working-class origin

simply doesn't stand a chance

within a system so completely stacked against them.

They're not redemptive or uplifting stories,

but the stories of meaningful lives stomped into the ground

by successive governments set against them.

Film drama can, erm, can ask questions.

It can make you angry on behalf of people

who are exploited or victimised, or oppressed.

Erm, it can give you a sense that something is wrong.

It can educate a very little and it can't organise at all.

It depends what you do when you leave the cinema.

I mean, the interesting thing

about Ken Loach and myself always being lumped together

is, in a very wide perspective, that makes some kind of sense.

But actually, when you get... When you move in on it,

we make very, very different kinds of films,

and I would say,

and Ken would agree, I know, cos we've talked about it,

erm, with quite different objectives.

I mean, you cannot see a film by Ken Loach

without knowing precisely what he's saying,

what the message is.

If we are to establish a cinema here

that is... reflects our stories,

our way of life, our humour, the things that concern us,

the whole culture of this land, these people,

then you cannot leave it to the market.

There's no way world cinema, in all its diversity and richness,

can penetrate that commercial setup.

What motivates you is there's still so many stories to tell

if anyone listens.

A new, young observer of the downtrodden British

was about to burst forth. I'm starting to get the feeling.

Petty criminal Shane Meadows was living in Nottingham

and looking for something to do other than steal breast pumps.

Luckily for us, he picked up a video camera.

His short film, Where's The Money, Ronnie?,

was seen by ex-Palace Pictures boss Stephen Woolley,

to whom Meadows's talent was clear.

Woolley put up the seed money for a feature screenplay,

and when that screenplay was written,

he put it in front of Bob Hoskins, who loved it.

TwentyFourSeven is a debut like no other.

There hadn't been a filmmaker like Meadows.

Whilst Loach and Leigh made films to speak for the working class,

and, let's remember, this is a tradition

that goes all the way back to the social realists,

Meadows was one of the first voices in three decades

to have actually come from that world himself.

There is a built-in social commentary,

but the stories Meadows told were largely autobiographical,

and never po-faced.

His films had music and energy and authenticity,

and they crackled with life.

He continued his run of lively, sharp, funny,

scary, observational films with A Room For Romeo Brass,

introducing the world to his old friend Paddy Considine.

Considine exploded onto the screen in this, his debut film performance.

As the deeply-disturbed Morell,

he brought a unique and unpredictable energy

which would single him out

as a character actor to be reckoned with.

But I believe that I fought an entity, a spirit, my demons.

I believe that I fought 'em and I won.

Considine and Meadows would go on to co-write Dead Man's Shoes,

a change of tone and genre, and perhaps a nod to Get Carter.

The film is black as night

and reveals a completely unexpected side to Meadows.

It remains one of the great British films of the 2000s.

Although Meadows was never a filmmaker to follow the pack,

violence was back in a big way by then.

It had happened almost unexpectedly,

starting with a film which, on paper,

sounded like it was doomed to fail.

This is not that film.

This is 1988's It Couldn't Happen Here.

By now, the notion of British bands having their own feature films

had pretty much ground to a halt,

and this Ken Russell-esque dreamlike road trip

for the Pet Shop Boys

would be the last nail in the coffin of that genre for a while.

A decade later, that coffin would be spectacularly exhumed

with THIS film, Spice World.

This is also not the film

which brought violence back to the British screen.

It's good, though. It is. It's fun. Look at it.

You won't get a more British moment in a film

than a Union Jack bus driven by a Spice Girl,

under the management of Withnail, under the instruction of Bond,

jumping over Tower Bridge

on their way to the Royal Albert Hall.

Anyway, right at the halfway point

between the Pet Shop Boys and the Spice Girls

making their cinematic opuses, it was announced

that the pretty-boy Kemp brothers from Spandau Ballet

were going to star as the Kray twins in a biopic feature.

The Krays were London's most infamous gangsters,

and at the height of their notoriety in the 1960s,

they were almost like pop stars themselves.

The notion of Gary and Martin Kemp filling these very big shoes

seemed ridiculous,

but the film was to be directed by Peter Medak.

Medak had been born in Hungary, but arrived in the UK in the '50s.

He had made some fantastic films here in the early '70s,

notably The Ruling Class, starring Peter O'Toole,

before pursuing a successful career in the US.

His interpretation of the story of the Krays

turned out to be a very good film,

and the Kemps proved to be inspired casting.

PANTING AND WHIMPERING Yes, I do.

Those expecting a violent and sadistic film

were not disappointed,

but were perhaps surprised by quite how much of the film

was based around domesticity

and the women that featured in the brothers' lives.

Billie Whitelaw as their mother,

Kate Hardie as Reggie's long-suffering wife.

SCREAMS

The film did not glorify the violence,

it sought to understand the brothers.

It was a very credible film.

In the mid '90s, something strange happened in the UK.

Maybe it was the relief of Thatcher's departure,

maybe the strong economy

which was surging under her successor,

but British people started feeling proud again.

This was not a patriotic political movement,

but a cultural one.

It did seem to become adrenalised

when Tony Blair's New Labour government took office,

but it was the coalescing of several movements.

In art, the Young British Artist movement,

featuring the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst,

were a fresh and revitalising force.

In music, Britpop was a celebration of the past and present,

with Oasis channelling The Beatles,

Blur doing similar with The Kinks,

Pulp evoking social realist stories with disco indie pop,

and many other bands finding inspiration

from Britain's last cultural heyday.

And at the forefront of the cinematic representation

was Danny Boyle.

Like Tony Richardson, Stephen Frears and Andrea Dunbar before him,

Boyle got his start at the Royal Court Theatre

before moving into TV.

He directed this distinctly lively episode of Inspector Morse.

Sex isn't safe any more. Maybe this is what you do instead.

His first feature film was Shallow Grave,

a dark black comedy with a unique cinematic energy.

The film was a success,

but Boyle's follow-up in 1996, an adaptation

of Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh heroin novel Trainspotting,

was a genuine revelation.

Choose life. Choose a job.

It wasn't just the energy, it was the spirit.

One might expect the story of a handful of young junkies

to be a dour, depressing affair.

Casual sex? SNORES

But Boyle's storytelling was a juggernaut without brakes,

and the sheer bombast of every moment

showered the audience with unrivalled highs, wretched lows

and bizarre, fantastical realisations of both.

Accompanied by a visually-striking marketing campaign,

the film made a star of everyone involved.

Good chips.

There were inevitable copycats,

many featuring the small pool of stars Trainspotting had created,

but nothing ever really came close to what Boyle achieved.

The Union Jack was everywhere to be seen,

having previously been out of favour since the early '80s

when skinheads and football hooligans

had appropriated it tribally.

High art and culture were celebrating

everything wonderful about these sceptred isles.

There was a trickle-down effect

which maybe reignited a less-desirable side.

Whilst Vanity Fair declared to its US readers,

London Swings Again, another culture was emerging.

Lad culture.

Magazines like Loaded, FHM and Zoo emboldened the rise of the new lad.

Young middle-class men, liberating themselves

from the troublesome shackles of political correctness and feminism,

were finally able to express their masculinity through...

I don't know, drinking lager and singing very bad renditions

of Angels by Robbie Williams after chucking-out time.

Lad culture finally found its way onto the cinema screen in 1998.

Writer and director Guy Ritchie and producer Matthew Vaughn

were an unexpected shot in the arm for the British film industry.

Both were young men from wealthy, semi-aristocratic backgrounds,

but had no interest in making films that reflected that world.

Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels

was a surprising, bombastic and accomplished debut,

which seemed to create a genre of its own

the second it landed on the screen.

It owes a debt to The Long Good Friday,

but it does something very unique with its heightened tale

of crooks, chancers, drug dealers and gangland bosses.

All right, keep still.

It has fun.

The virtually unknown cast

backed up by established character actors

and the screen debut of bad-boy footballer Vinnie Jones.

It was also the first time cinema audiences saw THIS face.

Statham.

The film was a huge success,

and as Ritchie and Vaughn paired off respectively

with Madonna and Claudia Schiffer,

to be an independent British filmmaker

suddenly became quite the aspiration.

The films that quickly followed Lock, Stock were notably darker

and less erudite. Shut up.

The genre was quickly reclaimed as a working-class movement,

and the subsequent films centred more on violence,

football hooliganism and gang warfare.

Guy Ritchie was eventually drawn to Hollywood,

making a new era of Sherlock Holmes films

and even directing the live-action Aladdin remake for Disney.

Filmmaker Nick Love kept the cinematic flame burning

with films like The Football Factory,

The Business and The Firm.

But the genre was destined to exist more on DVD

and, subsequently, streaming platforms.

Perhaps the last gasp of the genre cinematically

occurred when a post-Hobbit Elijah Wood

decided to show his range in Green Street,

a film which might have played quite well to an American audience,

but offered a laughable lack of authenticity to a British one,

such as the notion that football hooligans

all use Cockney rhyming slang.

Tom. A tom tit, a shit.

It's rhyming slang. Like bees and honey for money.

And then there's this scene.

Ever heard of a Chelsea grin, huh? Oh, come on, please!

Who knew that a Chelsea grin meant...

putting your credit card in someone's mouth?

But the '90s weren't all heroin

and putting credit cards in people's mouths.

One of the most critically and financially successful

British films of all time was released in 1997.

I was wandering around with nothing to do.

And I realised that most of the men in Sheffield

were also wandering around with not very much to do.

The only entertainment was to watch buildings being ball-and-chained

cos unemployment was massive and nothing was there to replace it.

And so that stuck in my head very much

just as part of growing up in the north

during the Thatcher years.

And then a producer came to me called Uberto Pasolini

and he had an idea about some men in a gym.

And it was about a group of men in a gym,

and there were two lines in it that he pointed at and he said,

"Here they go and see some male strippers."

And I went, "Yeah, it's the Chippendales.

"They've been around for ages. It's not that interesting."

He went, "No, it is." And he was from Italy, and he said,

"In Italy, this would never happen." And I went, "What do you mean?"

He said, "We are too proud. Italian men way too proud

"to do anything as demeaning as take our clothes off.

"So what has happened to you British men?"

And suddenly, all the, kind of, the tumblers all connected

and fell in the right order,

and I thought, "Yes. This is amazing."

You put unemployment together with this crazy idea of making money

by taking your clothes off,

and you have something really interesting,

which isn't about stripping.

It's about disenfranchisement, it's about a loss of dignity,

it's about trying to regain some sort of control over your life

when everything's been taken away from you.

I'm just gonna put this out there.

The Full Monty is the most perfect British film ever made.

I know. Take me on, I will destroy you.

Is it the best British film ever made? Probably not.

IS it my favourite? Not even close.

But, BUT, it is the perfect distillation

of everything that makes British cinema wonderful

and few films have ever come close to so successfully charming

such a broad audience of punters and critics alike.

But why? Why do we love it?

Well, to begin with,

it's got a little bit of everything that we love

about modern British cinema.

It's got your social realism,

being the story of a group of working-class men

seeking to improve their lot.

It's got your politics.

The backdrop is a northern city suffering the aftermath

of the destruction of industry and the unions.

It's got your well-observed characters,

with representations of age, class, ethnicity and sexuality.

It's got your cheeky sexiness,

a bunch of normal blokes learning how to become strippers.

It's got your brilliant female characters,

supporting their men and bringing the fun.

It's got your hardworking underdogs

beating the odds by sheer fortitude of spirit.

Somehow, The Full Monty manages to evoke the core spirits

of everyone from Ken Loach to Robin Askwith,

to David Puttnam, via your Mike Leighs,

your Lindsay Andersons,

and it even has a lovely nostalgic Ealing comedy vibe.

It appealed to the audiences of all of those filmmakers.

It managed to be both deeply subversive

and perfectly mainstream.

It was both a tiny film and a comedy blockbuster.

That rarest of things, a film for pretty much everyone.

But how is it so likeable?

How did it connect with so many people?

At its core is a fascinating ambiguity

which has allowed it to speak to both sides of the political divide.

To the left wing,

it's a story of the endurance of the working-class spirit,

that "you can grind us down,

"but we'll find a way to come back stronger".

Perfect.

To the right wing, it's a defence of Thatcherism.

OK. Nathan.

"Don't expect the state to have to look after you.

"Pull your socks up, have a grand idea, work hard and...

"anyone can succeed." Perfect.

It's the most delicate, perfect balance

of subject, character and tone. You don't give a toss. You're kids.

Although if any one film

were to have the final say on Thatcherism

before the country diverted to calmer centrist politics,

it was this one, Brassed Off,

telling the story of the brass band of a northern coal mine

and their rise to national victory

set against the closure of their pit and loss of their jobs.

By the time they win the national championship in London,

their community is decimated.

In this blistering final scene,

their conductor, played by Pete Postlethwaite,

rejects the award in favour of the chance to be heard on their behalf.

This speech is a defining moment in British cinema.

Truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered.

But does it bollocks. Not compared to how people matter.

Because over the last ten years, this bloody Government

has systematically destroyed an entire industry. OUR industry.

And not just our industry, our communities,

our homes, our lives,

all in the name of progress and for a few lousy bob.

If this lot were seals or whales, you'd all be up in bloody arms,

but they're not, are they, no. No, they're not.

They're just ordinary common or garden,

honest, decent human beings,

and not one of 'em with an ounce of bloody hope left.

Oh, aye. They can knock out a bloody good tune.

But what the fuck does that matter?

Social realism and all that followed had hoped to articulate

the working-class experience cinematically.

But Brassed Off, written and directed by Mark Herman,

instead spoke directly through the screen

and summed up a decade under Thatcher

in no uncertain words.

Pete Postlethwaite

also starred in Simon Beaufoy's follow-up to The Full Monty.

Among Giants captures a love triangle between climbers

during a summer spent painting electricity pylons

in the Yorkshire moors.

I'm incredibly fond of that film and it's what started everything.

That was the script that Uberto read and went,

"Ah, this guy really is interested in men

"and the strange relationships they have with each other."

And it's sort of autobiographical about my life,

so I sort of love it in that respect.

And no-one knew what to do with it.

They bought it up thinking, "Ooh, it's got Monty magic dust."

And, I mean, it bombed.

I mean, just nobody went to see it at all.

And the few who did went, "Well, that wasn't funny.

"I thought it was supposed to be like The Full Monty."

They're brother and sisters, you know?

They're partner pieces about the north and about men,

and about what you do

when the life that you understood you were going to have

has disappeared and been taken away from you.

It just so happens that one was edited

to become much funnier than we thought it was going to be,

and the other one wasn't.

It was completely my love letter to the post-industrial landscape,

all those gasometers and cooling towers.

And it was so personal to me

and it sort of broke my heart that it was so disliked.

And here's the thing.

The fallout of the huge success of Four Weddings, The Full Monty,

and, hey, let's throw in Shakespeare In Love,

which made almost $300 million by the way,

was that now Britain had proven it could produce

relatively small films which could make massive money,

there developed an expectation for them to do just that.

The mainstream was awash with period dramas,

posh people in love, Lahn-dahn gangsters,

and groups of working or middle-class underdogs

joining forces to overcome a working or middle-class situation.

It wasn't that these films weren't good,

they were often very good, and making money and winning awards.

It was the sheer tedious lack of invention.

The market reduces competition.

Again, it's another lie.

The truth is the opposite of the lie.

The lie we're fed is competition gives you variety.

No, competition kills variety,

because the most successful take over the less successful,

so you end up with monopoly.

It's entirely possible to make a film that's completely committed,

isn't motivated by cynical commercial criteria,

but which is nonetheless commercial.

I mean, my film Secrets andamp; Lies, on an international scale,

has been massively successful commercially.

I think primarily it's because of what it's about,

because there are people round the world

whose lives have been affected

by the fact that they were given away for adoption

when they were kids, etc.

And also, it has a racial element, which is very important.

We finally had a Labour government,

but our film industry was becoming increasingly conservative,

with a small C. That's a very clever joke.

But Tony Blair's new government DID do something.

In 2000, the New Labour government established the UK Film Council.

Ken Loach and Alan Parker and I were, on one occasion,

summoned to the Select Committee at the House of Commons.

And it was out of that investigation inquiry

that the Film Council was formed.

A non-departmental public body that existed under the auspices

of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

A great deal of its funding came from The National Lottery,

and its remit was impressive and ambitious.

Amongst its many functions was the provision of funding

to develop films through pre-production

and prepare them for commercial investment,

to encourage non-established and non-commercial filmmakers,

and allow them to develop their craft and careers.

They put money into big productions

to help represent British culture abroad,

and they encouraged international production companies

to invest and film within the UK.

They had budgets to improve British cinemas,

providing them with upgrades to digital projection,

and greater capability with subtitling and disabled access.

They put money into film education,

created and funded nine separate regional agencies

who, in turn, encouraged local training

in production and exhibition.

It has to be said that the 2000s were a better time

for the representation of the diversity of British culture.

Gurinder Chadha

was not only an authentic British Asian female voice,

she was also an extremely good filmmaker.

Her 1993 debut, Bhaji On The Beach,

had struck a perfect comedy-drama balance,

whilst also exploring issues of age...

Fuck you! SCREAMS

..culture and identity.

Fuck off, too.

So, I'd always had this interest in British social realist films.

But at no point did I ever think I would be part of that world.

I remember during the Brixton uprising,

there was a headline in one of the tabloids

of a Black guy, a Rasta, with a Molotov cocktail in his hand,

and he was throwing it.

And the headline read something like "The face of Britain today."

And I remember looking at that and going,

"Wow," you know, "That is a very powerful misrepresentation."

I kind of started teaching myself media studies, if you like.

I watched an amazing documentary by Stuart Hall

called It Ain't Half Racist, Mum,

and that was another eye-opener

as to how the camera can completely lie.

After all, the media don't only give us

information about the world we live in,

they also shape our attitudes towards it.

I decided I needed to get behind a camera,

and I wanted to tell stories of people that looked that me

and my cousins.

My end goal was to challenge racism. That is why I became a filmmaker.

Like many of her male contemporaries,

Chadha was called to Hollywood,

and her next film, What's Cooking?,

built on her fascination with family, culture and food.

It showed the events surrounding four separate Thanksgiving dinners

with four families of different ethnicities.

But it was Chadha's 2002 film,

made with backing from the Film Council,

that was to surprise everyone.

Bend It Like Beckham tells the story of a teenage girl

from a British Indian Sikh family who loves football.

Against her father's wishes, she joins a girls' team

and proves to be a champion.

At its core, it really is about a father

who is trying to protect his daughter from racism.

The racism that he experienced and didn't allow him to dream.

And his journey at the end is to say to the daughter, "You're right."

Play well and make us proud.

The film was an unexpected smash hit.

It is the only film to have been officially released

in every single country in the world for distribution,

including North Korea.

It made over $76 million worldwide,

and a global star of Keira Knightley.

You might think this success would inspire

an explosion of films about British Asian families,

or even young British women, but it didn't seem to.

As a woman, you know, as a British Asian woman,

you know, making British films,

there's so few that my films have really become,

you know, social records and documents

of our history in Britain.

And every time I say that, I think of Galaxy Quest

and those poor aliens

that are looking at those episodes of, like, the Star Trek programme

going, "Ooh, historical documents!" But actually it's true.

That IS what it's like, you know?

Addressing the lack of female directors in British films

seemed to finally become a priority,

and some significant careers would be forged.

Andrea Arnold won an Oscar for her short film Wasp in 2005,

and graduated to features.

With her cinematographer Robbie Ryan,

she unleashed a fresh take on gritty working-class realism

in Red Road and Fish Tank.

It's only me.

Oi!

In the realms of experimental art film,

Sally Potter was lauded

for her visually-arresting adaptation

of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

I didn't give up.

I worked for seven years preparing a film called Orlando.

I had a file of rejections for it, you know, this fat.

Erm, people were saying, you know,

"This is a film that CAN never be made,

"WILL never be made, SHOULD never be made."

But it was a feeling of, OK, fight for this thing,

and find other ways of working,

which included making a European coproduction,

filming in Russia,

working with all kinds of outsiders in different ways.

And it paid off.

I was suddenly receiving a lot of bouquets

and baskets of fruit from agencies. LAUGHS

I'm an invisible force,

and my attention is entirely outside of myself.

I am not looking back at myself thinking, "Here I am doing this."

And thinking, "What is it that needs to be done?"

The preoccupation that other people have had all my working life

with, "What's it like being female doing that?"

has always felt like,

"But haven't you noticed what I've done with light?"

"Haven't you noticed what I've done with the editing?

"Haven't you noticed that this is a reference

"to where Russian cinema meets American cinema?"

I think it happens to everybody that they become kind of obliged,

in a way, to sort of hold the flag for their particular issue

that they've been born with, you know?

The Black filmmakers I know, it's very stressful

that they're feeling that

they continuously are having to make films about racism,

when they might want to make a film about agriculture.

Now, of course, female experience

is incredibly interesting cinematic material,

so it's not about denying that

and denying the wealth of experience.

What kind of experiences growing up female

can you bring to your work as a director?

Meanwhile, Lynne Ramsay

brought an immersive, abstract, visual poetry to the screen

and elevated Scottish cinema with Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar.

The Film Council funded Amma Asante's debut, A Way Of Life,

which explored teenage crime and poverty in South Wales.

And she went on to direct two period dramas,

Belle and A United Kingdom,

both telling historical Black British stories.

Our home.

As I stand here before you today,

what you see is the particular intersection

of being Black and female, and also British.

A story of love and of courage

that hopefully allows some kind of benchmark

to measure not only how far we've come,

but perhaps how far we still may need to go.

Sadly, we never really got there with representation.

Yes, some Black British stories were told.

Kidulthood, written by Noel Clarke,

and its sequels Adulthood and Brotherhood,

which he wrote and directed,

all got national releases and were well received.

The Hood films even earned a parody, Anuvahood.

That very rare thing,

a Black British comedy which was also a modest success.

Isaac Julien had made one of the great Black British films,

Young Soul Rebels in 1991.

Also another rare thing,

a film about the Black British gay experience.

Not now, not now. Not yet. It feels a bit weird.

It feels a bit weird. Yeah.

But like Horace Ove before him, Julien was a polymath.

A narrative feature film turned out to be less of a priority to him

in a long, successful career as an artist and documentarian.

Black British cinema had failed to get a foothold.

Yet the 2000s saw a generation of Black British actors

who would go on to international success...

You're a spy!

..usually having to assume an American accent to do so.

Lock dat door.

In 1996, Channel Four Films produced Beautiful Thing,

an adaptation of Jonathan Harvey's play

about two teenage council estate boys

who realise that their friendship is developing into something deeper.

It's a stunning piece of filmmaking

and one of the most touching love stories to come out of the UK.

But neither the screenwriter Jonathan Harvey

or director Hettie Macdonald

would go on to make another feature film.

By the mid 2000s, the UK Film Council

had supported, developed and funded a new generation of British films.

Some big talents emerged from this era,

Michael Winterbottom, Tom Hooper, Ben Wheatley,

but it was getting harder for new voices to be heard.

A growing drumbeat in the right-wing media

was getting louder.

Why should public money, even Lottery money,

be used by the Film Council to support films

which couldn't support themselves by turning a profit

and repaying the investment?

A culture of justification had taken hold

not just outside, but also inside, the industry.

The regular, achievable success of expensive period dramas

and cheaper home-grown comedies in The Full Monty mould

seemed to raise the question

as to why anyone might take a risk on anything else

unless an established talent were involved.

And then THIS film happened. Sex Lives Of The Potato Men.

The UK Film Council put up half of the modest £2 million budget.

First-time working class director Andy Humphries

had set out to make a working-class comedy

in his own style.

The result is undeniably amateurish,

but that was not at the root of the fearsome response

that the film provoked.

It was not the kind of working-class film

people felt should be made.

A raucous, dirty, unapologetic film

which got inevitably, but not entirely fairly,

compared to the sex comedies of the '70s.

Here's the irony.

The film's biggest detractors came from the left.

Peter Bradshaw, film reviewer for The Guardian, declared...

I'm not defending Sex Lives Of The Potato Men,

but when a very low-budget film from a first-time filmmaker

is released to such fury from all sides,

well, it's just another nail in the coffin, isn't it?

In 2010, David Cameron's Conservative government

dissolved the UK Film Council.

And that's kind of where our story ends.

Although, not quite.

Also in 2010, a fascinating film was released,

and I want to end this story by taking a look at it.

Before British cinema, as it was, faded,

this film came out and, in some ways,

it was the very apex.

Four Lions, in concept,

measures up to British film's greatest aspirations.

A story of a group of British working-class underdogs

from the north of England

who want to achieve something to give their lives meaning.

It's a knockabout comedy... No, I'm real!

..but also follows strongly in the tradition

of established social realism,

with obvious influences from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

The exception being that THIS group of British underdogs

are radicalised British Muslims

whose shared goal is to pull off a suicide bombing.

Let's bomb Boots.

They sell condoms that make you wanna bang white girls.

In this scene, they debate what might make a suitable target,

and we see how misguided, yet disenfranchised, they are.

Think a bit bigger than a chemist, right?

I'm not blowing my guts out over a bunch of tampons and cotton buds.

Right? What we're gonna do has got to last in history.

The genius of Chris Morris's film is that it adheres so well

to the standard British cinema comedy formula.

The viewer has complete empathy for the titular four characters,

but also the premise is a, pardon the pun,

radical inversion of that genre.

Amidst the laughs, the film doesn't shy away from showing police raids

on completely innocent Muslim homes, as was happening at the time.

By now, we're somehow rooting for these guys to succeed,

whilst knowing they must be stopped.

We need to go, now. Now!

The ultimate aim of the social realists has been achieved.

The audience has total empathy

with this disenfranchised group of outcasts.

And here it is, one of the most complex

and brilliant moments in British cinema.

Omar, played by Riz Ahmed, achieves his final goal.

Sad, funny, ironic, glorious and awful.

And that's pretty much where our story ends.

Why doesn't it come up to present day?

Well, because in many ways, cinema itself hasn't.

By 2010, British cinema had seemed to run out of steam.

Sure, there have been a few great films,

but we haven't seen any new movements

or grand innovation.

The highest-grossing British films

which made it to the cinema last year, 12 years later,

have been a Bond film, an action film from Matthew Vaughn,

a film about Princess Diana,

a film based on a sitcom in which, hey, they go on holiday,

and a film from Working Title

by one of our most treasured modern directors.

The British industry seemed to be kept afloat

from the 2000s

by the Harry Potter franchise and the Star Wars franchise.

And when we look at cinemas now,

actual, physical cinemas,

don't they just seem to have largely become the province

of huge American franchise films?

There are interesting films being made in Britain, for sure,

and representation and innovation are improving all the while,

but many of these films are now being produced

directly for streaming platforms

and rarely see the inside of a cinema.

The story of film in the 2010s is a very different story,

and it no longer seems to take place in a building

dedicated to throwing light through celluloid 24 times a second.

Hey, dry your eyes. Nothing last forever.

Although with the ongoing commitment to the Royal Charter

awarded to the BFI in 1983,

British film just might.

With their massive national archive, the BFI protect and store

British film history.

With their state-of-the-art facilities,

they also preserve and restore films to be enjoyed by future generations.

The took over the UK Film Council's commitment

to support and fund British film,

and remain a strong force in getting British films made.

Like this film, After Love, and this one, Ali andamp; Ava,

both intimate and touching tales of life in the UK.

And still, right there on London's Southbank

sits the National Film Theatre, BFI Southbank,

where audiences and filmmakers gather to celebrate,

well... this.

MUSIC: 'Enigma Variations, Op 36, IX (Nimrod)' by Edward Elgar

Subtitles by accessibility@itv.com