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'After a Lifetime' was Ken Loach's first drama for ITV, and his second
written by the Liverpool-born Neville Smith. Like their first collaboration,
'The Golden Vision' (The Wednesday Play, BBC, tx.17/4/1968), about
football-obsessed Merseysiders, it has a loose, semi-structured narrative that,
alongside the uncannily real performances from its largely non-professional
cast, enhances its quasi-documentary feel.
The drama explores the history of working-class struggle through the death of
lifelong activist Billy Scully and its impact on his two sons. Smith was
inspired by the death of his own father (photographs of whose life adorn the
opening credits) and played the eldest son himself. His grief accounts for some
of the raw emotion in his performance.
Through the testimony of their uncle John (former docker, communist and trade
unionist Peter Kerrigan) - who preserves the history of the workers' struggle
for power in his memories, pamphlets and press cuttings - the grieving brothers
have their eyes opened to their father's campaigning past. With quiet rage, John
relates the story of the 1926 General Strike, the violent suppression of
working-class protesters in 1911 by then home secretary Winston Churchill, and
the abandonment of the workers by the very institutions (the Labour 'Mafia', the
trade unions) that had been built to pursue their cause.
These points are underlined by fragments of radio reportage of the General
Strike - including Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Bourne's comments that the
strike was a sin against God, which plays over Billy's funeral service - in a
drama that otherwise pulls back from the documentary experiments of Loach's
Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70) period.
'After a Lifetime' was completed in 1969, but held back by LWT and the
Independent Television Authority, which demanded cuts for sexual language.
Though it insisted it was untroubled by the politics (citing instead concerns at
print quality and complaints from actors' union Equity), LWT finally relented to
a transmission only after a samizdat press screening, organised by producer Tony
Garnett, attracted favourable responses from critics: notably The Guardian's
Nancy Banks-Smith, who judged it "brilliantly funny, and moving with a sort of
subterranean rage".
'After a Lifetime' clearly left its mark on writer Alan Bleasdale, whose
classic Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC, 1982) ends with the death and funeral of
another working-class Liverpool activist, played by Peter Kerrigan. The sense of
homage is compounded by the appearance in both dramas of actor Mike Hayden as a
politically obtuse priest conducting the funeral.
Mark Duguid
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1. 'The Labour Mafia' (3:04)
