Barry Hines – Blood and Porridge

July 3, 2023July 6, 2023

Cinematic heroes 4: Brian Glover

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Brian Glover’s Wikipedia entry begins with a quote from the great man that served both as a mission statement and as a career summary: “You play to your strengths in this game. My strength is as a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.” For a quarter-century, Glover played characters that were shiny of pate, pugnacious of visage and flat of vowels in many a British movie, TV show and stage play, and in the process made himself one of the most recognisable character actors in the country.

Born in Sheffield and brought up in Barnsley, the young Glover initially followed in his father’s footsteps. His dad had been a professional wrestler and, while attending the University of Sheffield, Glover topped up his student grant by wrestling too. He fought bouts under the moniker of ‘Leon Aris, the man from Paris’ and was good enough to appear on television, featuring in the Saturday-teatime wrestling slots shown on the ITV programme World of Sport that, a half-century ago, turned such burly, grappling bruisers as Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Jim Brakes and Big Daddy into household names. He continued to wrestle long after he’d graduated and settled into a respectable day job, which was teaching English and French at Barnsley Grammar School.

One of Glover’s school colleagues was Barry Hines, who’d authored the novel A Kestrel for a Knave. In 1968, this was filmed as Kes by the incomparable Ken Loach. Loach needed someone to play the puffed-up, preposterous and loutish Mr Sugden, the PE teacher at the school attended by Kes’s put-upon, juvenile hero, Billy Casper (Dai Bradley). Hines suggested Glover. For his audition, and to test Glover’s believability as a teacher, Loach staged a playground brawl and got Glover to break it up. This obviously wasn’t difficult for him, being a teacher already and a wrestler.

Glover’s turn as Sugden, who organises a football match with his pupils, insists on captaining one of the teams, and then cheats, dives and brutally fouls the kids while spouting his own match commenatary – likening himself to “the fair-haired, slightly-balding Bobby Charlton” – provides a bleak film with its one shaft of comic sunshine. Come to think of it, Loach’s 1998 movie My Name is Joe has some funny footballing sequences too, and when he finally got round to directing a proper comedy, it was 2009’s Waiting for Eric with French soccer legend Eric Cantona. The beautiful game is clearly the one thing guaranteed to make the famously grim, anti-establishment Loach lighten up.

© Woodfall Film Productions / United Artists

Glover spent another two years teaching before his next acting assignment, which was a role in the Terence Rattigan play Bequest to the Nation. Thereafter, he swiftly became ubiquitous. On television he appeared in Coronation Street (1972), The Regiment (1973), Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeny, Quiller (all 1975), Secret Army (1977), Minder (1980), Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who (both 1985). In that last show he makes a memorable exit when he’s blasted away by some Cybermen. He also gives notable performances in two 1970s shows written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who at the time scripted virtually the only British TV sitcoms set outside London and southeast England. In a famous 1973 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads he plays the devious Flint, who makes a bet with Geordie heroes Bob and Terry that they can’t get through the day in Newcastle-upon-Tyne without hearing the result of an important football match. A year later, Glover joined the cast of Clement and La Frenais’ revered prison sitcom Porridge, playing the hapless, slow-witted convict Cyril Hislop, whose key line is: “I read a book once. Green, it was.”

When not playing bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshire chancers and convicts, Glover could leaven his northern tones with a twinkly avuncularity, which made him popular among advertisers. Thus, when his face wasn’t popping up on TV shows, his voice was popping up on commercials between TV shows. He voiced the TV advertisements for Allinson’s bread – “Bread with nowt taken out” – and for Tetley teabags. In the Tetley ads, he played the leader of the Tetley Tea-folk, an animated tribe of diminutive, white-coated, cloth-capped characters tasked with the exacting job of giving each teabag its ‘2000 perforations’.

© Wellborn / United Artists

Meanwhile, during the 1970s, Glover became a regular in British movies. These included Lindsay Anderson’s oddball 1973 epic O Lucky Man! and its follow-up, 1982’s Britannia Hospital (about which I intend to write on this blog very soon); Michael Crichton’s 1979 period adventure The First Great Train Robbery; and Terry Gilliam’s 1978 medieval comedy Jabberwocky, in which he plays the foreman of an ironworks that’s reduced to chaos when Michael Palin blunders into it. In Douglas Hickox’s 1975 London-set thriller Brannigan, he’s a minor villain who gets roughed up by John Wayne, playing a tough American cop on an assignment to the British capital – Wayne creates mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town. “Now,” he warns Glover, “would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”

In 1981, John Landis made his much-loved horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, the opening scenes of which, set in a northern pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, called for a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman. Obviously, there was only one man for the job. Landis duly cast Glover and the resulting scene, wherein he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke, is, along with Kes, his finest cinematic moment – both films show what a fine comic actor he was. Unfortunately, the pub’s jovial mood is then ruined when David Naughton and Griffin Dunn inquire about the strange five-pointed star painted on the wall. And as they’re ejected from the premises, Glover utters the film’s most quoted piece of dialogue: “Beware the moon, lads!”

© PolyGram Pictures / Gruber-Peters Company / Universal Pictures

Three years later, Glover turned up in another classic werewolf movie, playing a villager in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short story, The Company of Wolves. At one point, he’s involved in a brawl with the previous subject of this Cinematic Heroes series of posts, David Warner; and at another, he comes out with a very Yorkshire-esque line: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

Glover faced another monster, a slimy one rather than a hairy one, in 1992’s Alien 3, wherein he plays the warden in charge of a prison-colony on the stormy planet Fiorina 161. Sigourney Weaver crash-lands there, unwittingly bringing with her a cargo of egg-laying alien face-huggers. Directed by a young David Fincher, Alien 3 is a much-maligned film. It can’t help but seem anti-climactic after the previous film in the Alien series, James Cameron’s barnstorming Aliens (1986), and the fact that it begins by killing off most of the characters left alive at the end of Aliens didn’t endear it to fans. It’s got some wonderfully grungy set design, though, and there is something heroic about the film’s un-Hollywood-like, and commercially-suicidal, pessimism. Even Weaver herself gets it at the end.

One of Alien 3’s biggest problems is that, due to incompetent scripting and editing, most of its interesting characters – Glover, Charles Dance, Paul McGann – vanish from the story halfway through. Incidentally, for British audiences, Glover perhaps brought a little too much baggage to his role. When I saw Alien 3 in an Essex cinema, a scene where Weaver confronts Glover in his office, while he – voice of the Tetley Tea-folk – absent-mindedly dunks a teabag in a cup of boiling water, provoked guffaws.

© Brandywine Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Glover must have got on well with Sigourney Weaver, for he subsequently turned up in 1997’s Snow White: a Tale of Terror, in which Weaver played the evil queen. Another late role was in the endearingly off-the-wall 1993 comedy Leon the Pig Farmer, in which a young Jewish Londoner, played by Mark Frankel, gets the unsettling news that he was the result of an artificial-insemination mix-up and his father is actually a Yorkshire pig farmer – inevitably a bald-headed, rough-looking one played by Glover. What makes Leon, which also starred Fawlty Towers’ Connie Booth and former Bond girl Maryam D’Abo, slightly melancholic to watch now is the knowledge that lead-actor Frankel died in a motorcycle accident a few years later.

Glover’s stage CV was as busy as his film and TV ones. He appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of As You Like It (playing, appropriately, Charles the Wrestler) and Romeo and Juliet, while other theatre work included Don Quixote, The Iceman Cometh, The Long Voyage Home, The Mysteries and Saint Joan. Lindsay Anderson, a stage director as well as a film one, cast him in productions of the David Storey plays The Changing Room and Life Class and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw. Such was Glover’s fame by the time he appeared in a West End version of The Canterbury Tales that it was advertised with a slightly amended version of one of his catch-phrases: “Chaucer with nowt taken out.”

Glover was a literary figure as well. He was a prolific playwright and writer, was responsible for over 20 plays and short films, and penned a column in a Yorkshire newspaper. Asked to contribute a script to a 1976 TV drama anthology called Plays for Britain, which also featured writing by Stephen Poliakoff and Roger McGough, Glover found himself short of inspiration. He ended up paying a visit to a police station and inquiring if they’d experienced anything unusual lately that he might be able to use as an idea. While he was at the station, a woman trooped in to the front desk to report indignantly that someone had pinched her front door. Suddenly, Glover knew what his story would be about.

Meanwhile, I remember seeing him on a TV arts programme, discussing – with Anthony Burgess, no less – Paul Theroux’s acerbic 1983 travel book about the British coastline, The Kingdom by the Sea. Glover, who during his wrestling days had toured many of the towns Theroux wrote about, took particular exception to a comment Theroux made about Aberdeen: “…the average Aberdonian is someone who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.”

© UK Film Council / Entertainment Film Distributors

Alas, in September 1996, Brian Glover met his own Alamo. He underwent an operation for a brain tumour, although a fortnight later he was back at work, making one of his final films, Up ‘n’ Under. Fittingly, this was about the north-of-England sport of rugby league and was made by the playwright John Godber, whose debut play Bouncers has become a much-revived classic. Glover was among the first people to go and see Bouncers when it premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977 and was quick to offer Godber encouragement. Despite the surgery, the tumour eventually killed him in July 1997.

Thanks to his gruff-but-lovable persona, unmistakable voice, and talent for stealing any scene he was in, Glover lives on in the memory of people like me, who grew up watching a lot of television and movies in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Those folk include actor Jason Isaacs, who admits to using him as inspiration for his star turn as the Soviet war-hero and Red Army commander-in-chief Georgy Zhukov in Armando Iannucci’s historical satire The Death of Stalin (2017). While he played Zhukov as a blunt, abrasive and – crucially – Yorkshire-accented bad-ass, Isaacs said, “I had a picture of Brian Glover in my head. Magnificent actor.”

Meanwhile, Glover is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London, where a simple gravestone describes him as a ‘Wrestler… Actor… Writer’. Not just a Yorkshireman, then, but a true Renaissance man.

From wikipedia.org / © Edwardx

April 30, 2022

A threadbare future

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

I can’t imagine what has prompted me to repost in April 2022 this entry about Threads, the BBC’s terrifying 1984 drama about a nuclear strike on Britain, which I’d originally put on this blog four years ago to coincide with a remastered version of it being released on Blu-ray. I mean, it’s not as if anything is happening in the world at the moment to kindle fears of a holocaustic nuclear war breaking out. Is there?

It’s said that everyone remembered where they were and what they were doing on November 22^nd, 1963, when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Likewise, I remember where I was and what I was doing on the evening of September 23^rd, 1984, when BBC2 broadcast the apocalyptic drama Threads.

I was staying in the youth hostel in Aberdeen, with my second year as an undergraduate at Aberdeen University due to begin in a fortnight’s time. Having worked abroad for the summer, I was now back in the city trying desperately to arrange accommodation for myself for the year ahead. I’d spent the past few days trudging around flat-hunting without any luck and, to make matters worse, I’d just been informed that I wouldn’t be eligible for a student grant for the next year either. So I was feeling pretty low about my residential and financial situation that evening when I wandered into the youth hostel’s lounge and sat down among a crowd of hostellers who were about to watch something on television called Threads, a much-anticipated documentary-drama showing what would happen if a nuclear conflict broke out between America and the Soviet Union and the UK was struck by 210 megatons of nuclear weaponry.

It’s fair to say that by the time Threads ended 112 minutes later, my mood had not improved any. Mind you, nobody else in the lounge looked like they were bursting with joie de vivre. Bill Dick, the hostel’s usually easy-going and affable head-warden who’d been in the audience, couldn’t have looked more down in the dumps if he’d been buried to his neck in garbage. (I got to know Bill four years later when I spent a summer working at the hostel as a warden and had him as my boss.)

A while ago, something compelled me to view Threads again. Here are my thoughts on it from a 21^st century perspective. I should warn you that the remainder of this blog-entry will contain spoilers, though you’ve probably gathered already that in Threads absolutely nothing good happens.

Directed by Mick Jackson and written by the late Barry Hines, author of the 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave that a year later established Ken Loach as a cinematic force when he filmed it as Kes, Threads consists of three sections. There’s an initial 45 minutes showing life during the build-up to the cataclysmic nuclear strike. Then there’s another 45 minutes showing the strike and its immediate aftermath. And lastly there’s a 25-minute epilogue chronicling Britain a year, a decade, ultimately 13 years into the future when, with its natural environment, economy and social infrastructure pulverised, the country reverts to the Middle Ages. That’s the Middle Ages minus the chivalry, balladry and pageantry, but with plenty of fallout, nuclear winters, depleted ozone, ultraviolent radiation, cataracts, skin cancer and genetic damage.

The gruelling central section imprinted itself on my 19-year-old memory. I’ve carried its images around in my head ever since: milk bottles melting on doorsteps in the heat of a nuclear detonation, a charred cyclist (still on his bike) lodged amid the branches of a burning tree, cats igniting, dolls melting, a crazed woman squatting amid the rubble cradling her baby’s burnt corpse, a traffic warden with a bandage-swathed face holding off a starving mob with a rifle, doctors in an overrun hospital sawing away a leg while the un-anaesthetised patient screams through a gag, and several dozen other things involving flames, rubble, cadavers, rats, blood, wounds, excrement, vomit and general mayhem and horror. In particular, I’ve never forgotten the moment when a mushroom cloud rises terrifyingly above the skyline, causing one poor woman to wet herself in the middle of a street – something that led to the actress Anne Sellors having the briefest and most poignant entry ever on IMDb.

But having seen Threads again, I now appreciate the queasy effectiveness of the opening section too. Here, Hines and Jackson establish the focus of their story, two families in the Yorkshire city of Sheffield. These are the working-class Kemps and the middle-class Becketts. The Kemps’ eldest boy Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale) has been courting the Becketts’ daughter Ruth (Karen Meagher) and Ruth has just realised she’s pregnant. Jimmy and Ruth resolve to get married and start renovating a flat to live in while their families uneasily make each other’s acquaintance. Interestingly, this reflects the uneasy working relationship between Hines and Jackson themselves. According to Threads’ Wikipedia entry, the working-class Hines saw Jackson as something of a middle-class prat.

Meanwhile, ominously, news reports chatter in the background about escalating superpower tensions in the Middle East. The characters are initially oblivious to what’s brewing. Early on, we see Jimmy fiddling with his radio, wanting to get away from some boring news bulletin about the crisis and find the latest football results. Apathy gradually changes to shoulder-shrugging helplessness, something summed up by Jimmy’s workmate Bob (Ashley Barker). In the pub, he declares that they might as well enjoy themselves now because there’s bugger-all else they can do. Plus, if things do kick off, he hopes he’ll be ‘pissed out of his mind and straight underneath it.’ Ironically, Bob survives after nearly everyone else has perished and we last see him tucking into the raw and probably irradiated flesh of a dead sheep.

By the time the characters try to respond to what’s coming, it’s too late. The bomb goes off while the hapless Kemps are still assembling a fallout shelter comprised of a couple of doors propped against a living-room wall. The Becketts, being posher, have a cellar to retreat into. Not that they fare any better in the long run.

For me, it’s this opening section that brings home what Threads is about. A preliminary narration talks about the economic threads necessary for a society to function: “…everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.” However, my impression is that the truly important threads – which are obliterated once the missiles hit their targets – are the ones between people, of feeling and compassion, which have been refined by centuries of civilisation and, today, are the essence of what it means to be human.

Thus, we see Jimmy (whom we know has been cheating on Ruth and is a bit of a tosser) standing in the aviary in his family’s back garden, doting over the birds kept there. We see Mr and Mrs Beckett (Henry Moxon and June Broughton) trying to look after an ailing relative discharged from hospital after the NHS is ordered to clear its wards in anticipation of a flood of war casualties. We see Clive Sutton (Harry Beety), the local government official put in charge of an emergency team that will run things from a bunker underneath Sheffield City Council, attempting to reassure his nervous wife. But empathy for our fellow creatures rapidly disappears as, in the war’s aftermath, humanity degenerates into a shell-shocked, zombie-like rabble fixated only on its own, scrabbling-in-the-dirt survival.

This is made explicit in Threads’ final stages when, years later, we’re introduced to Jane (Victoria O’Keefe), the daughter of Ruth and Jimmy. When Ruth dies, sick, exhausted, blinded by cataracts and looking decades older than her true age, an impassive Jane reacts by stealing a few items from her mother’s corpse and then clearing off. The few kids born post-holocaust are a scary bunch, by the way. Their language is limited to phrases like “Gizzit!” and “C’mon!” and they generally act like feral mini-Neanderthals.

Threads came in the wake of the bleak 1983 American TV movie The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer, which depicted the effects of a nuclear strike on Kansas City and caused a considerable stir on both sides of the Atlantic. But while I like The Day After, I think the altogether more graphic and relentless Threads beats it to a bloody pulp. For one thing, Meyer’s film is disadvantaged by its cast of familiar actors like Jason Robards and John Lithgow, which means you can’t ever forget you’re watching a dramatic fabrication. In Threads, the cast is comprised of unknown performers, which adds to its harrowing sense of authenticity.

That said, saddoes like myself might recognise David Brierley, who plays Ruth’s father, as the voice of K9 in the 1979-80 series of Doctor Who; and a couple of voices heard from the early blizzard of news reports are familiar, like Lesley Judd from the BBC’s famous kids’ magazine programme Blue Peter, and Ed Bishop, star of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi show UFO (1970). I’m glad Jackson decided not to go with his original casting idea, which was to use actors from the venerable north-of-England TV soap opera Coronation Street – disturbing though the sight of Jack and Vera Duckworth puking their guts up in a makeshift fallout shelter would have been.

Threads also contains the sonorous tones of the great voiceover actor Patrick Allen, whom the UK government had hired to narrate its Protect and Survive public information films that would be broadcast if nuclear war looked imminent. By 1984, the media had got hold of these films and discussed them at length and they’d been derided for their epic uselessness if Armageddon really happened. (At one point in Threads we hear Allen crisply and matter-of-factly advising the public on how to deal with corpses: “…move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.”) Earlier in 1984, Allen’s Protect and Survive voice-work had been sampled in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s hit single Two Tribes – for which he sportingly added the lines: “Mine is the last voice you will ever hear. Do not be alarmed.”

The futility of Protect and Survive and officialdom’s attempts to deal with the holocaust generally are embodied in Threads by Sutton and his team, who utterly fail to provide leadership and control once the bombs have gone off. Trapped in their bunker under the rubble of the flattened council building, with insufficient training, malfunctioning equipment and limited supplies of food, water and air, they succumb to bickering, despondency, hysteria and – finally – asphyxiation. Predictably, when order is re-established in Sheffield, it’s pretty brutal in nature.

Brutal too is the narrative as it moves forward in time, with Telex-type captions flashing up on the screen giving statistics about fallout levels, the nuclear winter, the ozone layer, epidemics and an ever-rising death-toll. Things climax with the now-teenaged Jane giving birth after she’s been raped by another of the feral kids. The baby is stillborn and deformed, and Threads’ last image is a freeze-frame of Jane’s face as she recoils in horror from it. Early on, Jimmy’s kid brother Michael (Nicholas Lane) had embarrassed his parents by asking, “What’s an abortion?” Threads ends with the implication that humanity has unwittingly aborted itself.

It isn’t perfect. Thanks to budgetary restrictions, there’s a reliance on stock footage and stills from previous wars and conflicts, which don’t necessarily look like they’re occurring in Sheffield in 1984. And despite valiant efforts by the make-up department, the actors playing the long-term survivors are a bit too plump and healthy-looking – by then they should have resembled death-camp inmates. Additionally, the fact that Threads takes place in a pre-Internet, pre-social media world gives it a quaint distance now. Imagine the reaction if the equivalent events happened today. While the first warheads exploded over Britain, Twitter would be babbling with idiots blaming everything on immigrants or Muslims or woke-ism or the Covid-19 vaccine. But, as a traumatic account of what might engulf us if our political leaders are possessed by a moment of trigger-happy madness, it’s still unbeatable.

And, in April 2022, with Vladimir Putin making threatening noises about nuclear retaliation against NATO for helping to thwart his military campaign in Ukraine, Threads seems no less relevant than it did 38 years ago. That’s a sentence I take no pleasure in writing.