Loach up the junction

“The theory back then was that you were making TV plays, not films, so you had to make them electronically in the studio. But the BBC did allow you two or three days to do location shooting, like shots of people getting in a car, driving somewhere, then getting out of the car, whereupon you’d cut back to the studio. So we said ‘OK, we’ll take those two or three days,’ but we actually managed to nick four days of location shooting altogether. And in those four days we filmed half of what would end up in the final 72-minute piece. I had a young cameraman, Tony Imi, who just put the camera on his shoulder and ran for four days.”

Ken Loach on the filming of Up the Junction, in Loach on Loach, edited by Graham Fuller (Faber & Faber, 1998)

And the result is immensely powerful, particularly for anyone who dismisses Loach as a grim-up-north-realist. ‘Up the Junction’ is a passionate celebration of the spirit of working people - no surprise there - but presented as a giddy whirl of moving cameras, bopping teens and leery, half-heard pub arguments.

In 1965, when Loach made this ‘Wednesday Play’ for the BBC, he was, like most young people interested in film, under the influence of the French new wave. You can still see the influence in 1967’s Poor Cow, with it’s impromptu dialogue and disruptive use of intertitles.

I recall an interview with one of the creator’s of the 90s TV seriesThis Life proudly describing how they chose the radical step of filming conversations from across the street or across a pub, to create a feeling of immediacy. How embarrassing that Loach, that stalwart of worthy social drama, had stylistically preceded them by over 30 years. Then again, in the sixties even the workaday Sidney J. Furie was pulling the same tricks in The Ipcress File.

I haven’t seen the 1967 film version, but comparison will be interesting, particularly as the play has a very loose narrative, concentrating instead on sketching quick portraits of characters making their way in and around Clapham Junction. The ensemble acting and the emotional highpoints provided by music - whether courting couples dancing in a bar or young women singing Beatles hits as they take their washing to the launderette - also prefigure the sentimental community portraits that Mike Leigh has now made his speciality.

With this film and the same year’s devastating Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach not only made a lasting name for himself, but showed the dramatic impact achievable in the previously dubious genre of the TV play. It’s not that challenging social dramas no longer get commissioned - BBC2 shows a couple of gems a year, and even EastEnders can be more genuinely daring than the majority of single plays ever were in the ‘golden age’ of the late sixties and early seventies. But, soaps aside, social drama will never again be prime-time viewing. And Loach, even with his films now regularly released to worldwide acclaim, will never find an audience as large as for those Wednesday Plays.