Ken Loach's documentaries tend to be overlooked in accounts of his career,
but taken as a whole, they have been at least as contentious as his more visible
film and television dramas. His first, The Save the Children Fund Film (aka In
Black and White), was commissioned in 1969 by the eponymous charity, although
London Weekend Television put up two-thirds of the budget in return for
screening rights. However, when the charity discovered that Loach's film
represented their efforts in England as characterised largely by class prejudice
and one of their schools in Kenya as a hotbed of neo-colonialist attitudes, they
threatened to sue Loach and destroy the film, faced with which LWT meekly wrote
off their investment and agreed not to screen it. Fortunately, however, the
charity agreed to the print being lodged with the BFI, and the film received its
first public screening in 2011.
A similar fate befell Talk About Work, which the Central Office of
Information commissioned from Loach partly to dispel the image of the
insensitive careers officer portrayed in Kes (1969). However, when Loach
included footage of one of the young interviewees describing his work in Ford's
Halewood car plant as soul destroying, the COI refused to release the film.
Throughout the 1970s Loach concentrated on television drama, but by the start
of the 1980s he had abandoned fiction in favour of documentary. Television drama
was becoming increasingly expensive, and radical drama especially hard to
finance. He also felt that the advent of Thatcherism, with its overt assaults on
the working class, and especially on trade union rights, called for the
directness of the documentary form. As he himself put it:
"There were things we wanted to say head on and not wrapped up in
fiction...things that should be said as directly as one can say them...
Thatcherism just felt so urgent that I thought that doing a fictional piece for
TV, which would take a year to get commissioned and at least another year to
make, was just too slow... Documentaries can tackle things head on, and you can
make them faster than dramas, too - though, with hindsight, it's just as hard,
if not harder, to get them transmitted."
Just how hard is illustrated by the fate of a number of his 1980s
documentaries. His film on the 1980 steel strike, A Question of Leadership (ATV,
tx. 13/8/1981) was deemed 'unbalanced' by the Independent Broadcasting Authority,
not transmitted for over a year after its completion, cut to accommodate
a 'balancing' discussion at the end, and never shown outside the Midlands ATV
region. Meanwhile Questions of Leadership, four programmes about the
relationship between the leadership and the rank and file of the trade union
movement, commissioned in 1982 from ATV's successor, Central Television, by
Channel 4, ran into further problems over 'balance' with both the IBA and
elements within the Channel's own management itself.
But once these had been more or less resolved, Central's board suddenly
produced the argument that the films were defamatory of specific trade union
leaders and withdrew them. But as Loach biographer Anthony Hayward has revealed,
the real problems for Central were political; not only did certain board members
regard the films as too left-wing, but one of the trade union leaders criticised
in the film was electricians' leader Frank Chapple, on whom board member and
media tycoon Robert Maxwell was highly dependent for the smooth running of his
numerous printing operations. Maxwell's representative on the board was the
former Attorney-General Sam Silkin, whose legal advice persuaded the board that
the programmes were defamatory. They were never transmitted.
Loach also encountered problems with his film about the music and poetry
which emerged from the 1984-85 coal dispute, Which Side Are You On? This was
commissioned by Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show (ITV, 1978-2010), but the
company's controller of drama, Nick Elliott, insisted on the cutting of some of
the scenes involving police brutality towards the striking miners, and even
Bragg felt that the film was too political for an arts slot. Loach refused to
cut the police scenes but nonetheless he and Bragg attempted to construct a
version acceptable to both of them as well as to the LWT hierarchy. When the
latter refused to budge Bragg sold the film to Channel 4 (tx. 9/1/1985), but,
true to form, the IBA decreed that it must be 'balanced' the following week by a
programme deeply unsympathetic to the striking miners.
Loach's other 1980s documentaries were less contentious. 'End of the Battle...
Not the End of the War?' (aka 'We Should Have Won', Diverse Reports, Channel 4,
tx. 27/3/1985), which enabled him to return both to the coal dispute and to the
theme of the betrayal of rank-and-file trade unionists by their leaders. Loach
revisited the strike again with 'The Arthur Legend' (Dispatches, Channel 4, tx.
12/6/1989), challenging the vilification of miners' leader Arthur Scargill by
the Daily Mirror and ITV's The Cook Report (1987-98). Since the Mirror was then
owned by Robert Maxwell, this adds further resonance to the tycoon's role in
banning Questions of Leadership.
The 1990s saw Loach return to both the BBC and the Liverpool Docks setting of
his drama 'The Big Flame' (The Wednesday Play, tx. 19/2/1969) with 'The
Flickering Flame' (Modern Times, tx. 8/12/1996), focusing on the 329 dockers who had been sacked and
replaced by non-union labour for refusing to cross a picket line, whose dispute
the leadership of the Transport and General Workers had refused to make
official.
That so many of Loach's documentaries faced such difficulties in getting
shown all too clearly demonstrates the narrow limits of the politically possible
in even the more liberal sections of Britain's media. As Loach himself put it:
"Working people are allowed on television so long as they fit the stereotypes
that producers have of them. Workers can appear pathetic in their ignorance and
poverty, apathetic to parliamentary politics, or aggressive on the picket line.
But let them make a serious political analysis based on their own experiences
and in their own language, then keep them off the air".
Julian Petley
Further reading:
Hayward, Anthony (2005), Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films (London: Bloomsbury)
Petley, Julian (1997), 'Ken Loach and questions of censorship', in George McKnight (ed.),
Agent of Challenge and Defiance: the Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks Books)
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