The North: a Cultural Wasteland

Finally read This Sporting Life by David Storey, and I quite enjoyed it, much more than I enjoyed his later novel Saville (see my earlier comments on that). Maybe one of the reasons was that it was about a third of the length of Saville, and kept its focus. There were a couple of places (as with Saville) that violence or arguments apparently erupted from nowhere, making me think the characters were over-reacting or just unhinged, but maybe it's a product of its era and I just don't appreciate quite how controversial some of the dialogue or circumstances would have been at the time.

I've never seen the film despite its brief filming in my native village (Big Brother watched it for that reason earlier in the week, and suggested I should watch it sometime but warned me there's a lot of grimness and rugby to sit through) but from what I gather it's different from the book, even the main character's name. In the book, Arthur Machin is a young factory worker who gets signed to the local rugby team for a fair sum. Though he could live on his rugby pay, he carries on working and remains in his cheap lodgings but buys a car and lives it up a bit, going to parties and greyhound races. He's a bit full of himself, headstrong and self-centred, but not nearly as bad as some of those around him, or as bad as his parents seem to think. His love affair with his widowed landlady is hard to fathom but in many ways its successes and failures are what seems to drive him. Though his status as a rugby player is central to the novel, rugby itself isn't, and if (like me) you neither understand nor care about rugby that shouldn't take away from your appreciation of the book, which is a good example of the northern working class novel of the 60s.

This Sporting Life was first published in 1960, and Big Brother directed me to the iplayer when he'd watched the film, where I found a programme purporting to document the explosion of northern culture in 1960, including this novel. My other half sometimes disputes (possibly in jest, though I'm never entirely sure) Yorkshire's claim to be Northern. I guess if you're a Geordie the only place more northern than you is Scotland, but at least we can both agree that Nottingham is not The North by any stretch of the imagination, unless perhaps you're a BBC type who saw The North as an exotic country (starting around Watford) back in 1960. In other words, this was one of those 'with friends like these...' programmes where the BBC attempts to condemn patronising attitudes of the past, and in doing so patronises mightily. If I hadn't have had a mouth full of omelette, I would have been shouting at the computer. It was as if they'd run out of examples early on, and brought in 'northern writer' DH Lawrence (from Nottinghamshire) to fill the gap (maybe they just wanted an excuse to bring up the trial, and use rude words on BBC4).

1960 also saw Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving and of course Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse. Both novels were mentioned, but mainly in terms of the slightly later film versions. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning also featured (film 1960, novel 1958).

Robert Bolt (born just outside Manchester I think) had 2 new plays in 1960, one of which was A Man For All Seasons, and neither of which were mentioned. Tony Richardson (Shipley-born film director) was mentioned, but for A Taste of Honey which is a very good film but came out in 1961 (and the play debuted in 1958, so I'm not sure why they spent so much time on it in a programme about 1960). What they didn't mention was The Entertainer, released in 1960, directed by Richardson, featuring Shirley Anne Field, Thora Hird, Albert Finney, Joan Plowright - all born north of the northernmost point of the Welsh-English border as far as I know (and that's a good start for deciding what to designate the north of England, I've always thought). The 1960 Stanley Baker film Hell Is A City was set and filmed in Manchester, based on a novel by a Lancashire man.

I could go on, but I'm in danger of spilling tea on the keyboard in ranting gesticulation, and that would never do. It's a shame that such a promising programme lost focus, spending quite a bit of its hour (so it seemed) on non-1960 output, non-northern output, and Coronation Street. With courage and research it could have been an informative look at the wealth of northern culture of the time, and a response to the all too frequent sneers turned our way from The South. I'll let Big Brother have the last word: "What does he mean he likes the scene on the slag heap in Billy Liar? Slag heap? That's Bradford Moor!"