Film Flam

Apparently this is the Summer of British Film. That could be a punch line in itself, except there’s really nothing to laugh about.

Friday evening on BBC2, the half-hour Once More with Ealing followed the owners of the revitalised Ealing Studios as they went about filming their completely unnecessary remake St Trinian’s and then trying to flog the project at the recent Cannes Film Festival. God it was a depressing sight.

Missing the beginning meant I didn’t catch their names and job titles. When it came to the promotional poster design there was one woman, whom I frankly wouldn’t have trusted to make the tea, who decided that rather than push the fact that Rupert Everett and Colin Firth had been dragged into the sorry affair/headlined the film, the poster should just feature a line-up of schoolgirls and trade on the St Trinian’s name. Luckily she was overruled.

That sequence alone displayed the narrow-minded, parochial mindset of British filmmakers and the overall folly of the venture. Does St Trinian’s mean anything to the younger generations of today?


Cartoonist Ronald Searle created St Trinian’s in the late 1940s to be the complete antithesis to the posh boarding schools for girls of that era. The initial quartet of films made by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat that began with 1954’s The Belles of St Trinian’s played up the mayhem with contemporary social satire.

By the time of The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery in 1966, the series had run out of steam, while 1980’s late entry, The Wildcats of St Trinian’s – which proved to be Launder’s swansong – was a dispiritingly feeble and pointless entry. Now, at a time when the little hoodied fuckers roaming the streets wear their ASBOs with pride and are far worse at wreaking havoc than the school’s ferocious Fourth Form or sexually overt Sixth Formers, what is the point of St Trinian’s in this day and age?

Maybe it was answered at the top of the show and I missed it. Then again, one of the most recent of the new Ealing films was the execrable Alien Autopsy starring Ant and Dec that stank and sank. Given how few foreign sales they managed in Cannes, St Trinian’s looks like it’s destined to take the exact same route.

Then last night came Guns, Gangsters And Getaways: The Story Of The British Thriller. This was the first part of the seven-part British Film Forever, the BBC’s “flagship series” of The Summer of British Film. This time last year, BBC2 had the marvellous eight-part documentary series The Story of Light Entertainment. Entertaining and informative, and certainly benefiting from the 90-minute running time per episode, the series started with Double Acts before moving on to All-Round Entertainers, Radio Stars, The Comics, Pop and Easy Listening, Impressionists, Chat Shows, and finally Variety.

British Film Forever followed pretty much the same format. Rather than go decade by decade, which would have certainly ended on a downer, has been divided into genres – Thriller this week then Romance, Social Realism, Costume Drama, Horror/Fantasy, War before ending with Comedy. Whereas The Story of Light Entertainment was entertaining and informative, virtually leaving no stone unturned as it told the history of the popular strand of television, Guns, Gangsters And Getaways: The Story Of The British Thriller was a complete and utter fucking mess.

Obviously one hundred years of British cinema has to lot of ground to cover. There was an instance in the programme where it looked like British Film Forever was going to make the effort. Then it gave up. The Story of Light Entertainment took each of its categories and created a tight chronological narrative. British Film Forever occasionally strayed toward trying to put the chosen films in some kind of context, but it increasingly looked like someone had started out devising a history then not quite figuring how to get a handle on it and giving up.


For some reason it started with The Long Good Friday before lurching off all over the place. Nearly all the films were the obvious choices: Get Carter, Brighton Rock, The Ipcress File, The 39 Steps, Mona Lisa, The Third Man, The Italian Job, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Even when it came time for James Bond to make an appearance, the segment bounced from Dr No to You Only Live Twice then back to Goldfinger. Live and Let Die got a look in before it leapt to the present and Casino Royale.

Pick key and iconic films by all means but create a narrative thread that explains why the selected movies are relevant. According to the BBC press release, “the series reveals untold stories from behind the scenes and examines what makes British film unique and what it reveals about British culture.” Er, no. There was no real examination and absolutely no contextualization. Untold stories amounted to the likes of veteran director Bryan Forbes admitting that he was first approached to direct Dr No and turned the offer down. Okay.

It may have helped if the programme makers had interviewed surviving writers, directors and producers as well as sourcing relevant archive clips to that people had something relevant to say. The Long Good Friday’s John Mackenzie had the occasional look in, as did Danny Boyle to talk about Shallow Grave, but neither were on screen long enough to say anything worthwhile. Remarkably Len Deighton even put in an appearance to talk about The Ipcress File but after one brief sound bite of little consequence he disappeared for good.

All that was left was a long parade of talking heads – most of who had nothing to do with the project – giving their opinions of the various films, just like one of Channel 4’s 100 Best lists. Actors would talk about their favourite scenes or recite lines of dialogue, which would then, rather obviously, segue into the exact scene they had just described. Oh, and Kate Winslet popped up to declare she wouldn’t make a good Bond girl. No offence love, but fuck off.

It was like if the BBC Natural History Unit’s next series cut away from their routinely spectacular footage to irrelevant non-entities like Richard Bacon saying “Well, my favourite animal is the orangutan,” or have James Brown, taking a break from wanking off over Michael Caine films, to say how much he liked aardvarks. It was documentary for tabloid television and nothing more.


Even the reasonably sensible remarks had the superficiality of the standard Electronic Press Kit footage. If you knew the films you wouldn’t learn anything. If you weren’t familiar with a particular film, bad luck because they invariably gave the ending away. Meanwhile, the ill-judged narration barely reached the level of the user comments on IMDb. The appearance of Richard Attenborough as Pinky Brown in Brighton Rock came with the reminder that he was “the old man who made the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.” Yes, really.

One thing the season should have going for it, even if every episode is similar to this horribly wasted opportunity, is the accompanying selection of films, although during the week most of them appear to be scheduled late into the night. Yesterday afternoon the ‘thriller week’ began with a welcome Hitchcock double: The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Immediately after the first part of British Film Forever were two Stephen Frears-directed films: Dirty Pretty Things and his first feature, the rather eccentric Gumshoe.

While the latter is always welcome, I couldn’t quite see how Dirty Pretty Things fitted into this week’s ‘thriller’ category. The Social Realism strand in a couple of weeks time seemed the more appropriate place, but then again it was just another example of how none of this had been properly thought through. It’s a shame they couldn’t have gotten hold of The Hit from 1984, Frears’ second film after a decade working in television, starring Terrance Stamp as an ex-gangster who grassed up his colleagues a decade ago, and John Hurt and Tim Roth as the hitmen who snatch him from his home in Spain and take him north to face the music.

Next week’s episode is Longing, Loving And Leg-Overs: The Story Of British Romance. Even if you don’t bother watching it, try and catch the afternoon double from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: I Know Where I’m Going followed by The Red Shoes.