Best Depictions of Yorkshire in Cinema

im specifically interested in west yorkshire really

Beiderbecke affair is a good call.

I'd have to say Rita Sue and Bob too though, which is a thoroughly depressing thought.

New World Symphony to thread

X-post with Ed but what the hey. Shaftesbury is a seething hotbed of iniquity, or so my Dorset correspondant informs me.

Other anwsers: um Wuthering Heights? (Actually I hate Wuthering Heights)

how is Salford in Yorkshire?

i suppose there's a bit where they go to Bradford..

Stephen Frears' "Song of Experience" is great - it *is* a film, I think, although a short made-for-TV one shown by the BBC in the Screen Two series in 1986. It's the closest thing to Dennis Potter without actually having the characters miming the songs - it's set in 1960, and its use of mainly American pop music (tough swaggering on a steam train to the Hollywood Argyles' "Alley-Oop", dancing in the rain on a grim vaguely Doncaster-esque station platform to Bobby Rydell's version of "Volare", the promise of "Wake Up Little Susie", the tears of "Tammy" and "Mr Blue") sets it in sharp and necessary contrast to the puritan socialist attitudes, hinted at when we see a Yorkshire Post headline referring to Hugh Gaitskell, whose rejection had brought about Labour's traumatic defeat the previous year. Apart from the Yorkshire resonance, it's worth comparing to Potter's "Lipstick On Your Collar", and to the populist 50s nostalgia so influential at the time (check the Top 10 for 5th April 1986 - four out of the top nine singles, including the top two; not even the Art of Noise's presence can redeem it). Something similar now set Oop North in the 70s could destroy Stuart Maconie's entire career.

I love Billy Liar and This Sporting Life, but I don't recall seeing any films set in rural Yorkshire, apart from British Transport Films' 1962 effort "North to the Dales". The more Tory parts of the county were best captured on television by YTV in the 70s - Barry Cockcroft's documentaries (Hannah Hauxwell and all that) and everything they filmed on the Harewood estate purely because it was the nearest bit of countryside to Leeds, from Follyfoot to Flambards (hell, even *Emmerdale* was bearable when it was still a Farm). But the one film you really need to see is "This Town", a short vision of Halifax on the cusp in 1969, shown last year on the Artsworld satellite channel. My thoughts on it from another essay:

"While all this was going on ('all this' = Clean Air Acts, railway modernisation etc etc), the first mass rehousing of the working class since the 'flight from the land' was taking place - the demolition of the old back-to-back terraced houses in the industrial towns, and the moving of the population to tower blocks and new housing estates which had a much more standardised, suburbanised design aesthetic. The 1969 short film 'This Town', a blood-rushingly striking picture of Halifax on the cusp, captures this process chillingly: people still work en masse in the factories, still walk as one through the streets and through the town's market, but suddenly it jump-cuts from the crowds to adverts in the town utilising glossy imagery in the vein of a 60s Bond movie, and then it shows the new flats with the vague promise of a new form of employment (of course it also gives the lie to the notion, beloved of some on the anti-Blair hard left, that the Wilson government was particularly concerned about the patterns of living that had grown up in the areas formed by the Industrial Revolution to which the Labour Party owed its very existence; if it was felt that such things had to be sacrificed to its beloved modernism, then sacrificed they were). The film ends with a frozen image of terraced housing clearly about to be pulled down forever; de-industrialisation was on the way, even if it wasn't foreseen at the time."

(you will have many mixed emotions if you see this, Gareth)

Robin: A great post. Never seen "This Town" (don't have Artsworld sadly), but certainly sounds to have captured seminal changes... "Song of Experience" I have watched recently, and it's a despairing film isn't it? A due corrective perhaps to the one-way traffic of the portrayal of the 1950s as cosy and 'innocent'. I couldn't believe what I was seeing at one particular point; all the more effective for nothing being shown, as the camera stays behind the door. And more surprisingly, the lingering reactions of the policeman. There are no answers; as a film it is a grim, frightening slice of life. And how "Tammy" hits home in that late context.

We really ought to add "Kes" to the list, obvious choice though it may be.

what do you think of this film?

the clothes were striking, in a depressingly fluffy/garish hybrid. i couldnt tell where most of the bradford scenes were, when sue is with the asian lad, manningham is very recognisable, but bobs posh estate i dont know, rita council estate i dont know (possibly the canterbury estate?), sues tower block, possibly off manchester road just south of the city centre. the taxi place is in barkerend i think. the guff for the film says buttershaw, but i dont know there so well...

was sues dad overacted, i thought his walk was comically exaggerated. the mum was played about right though

the nightclub scene was depressingly mundane and provincial, that was played quite well, like older films versions of smoky working mens clubs but without the poverty tourist romanticism, plain and bleak.

alan bennet and stephen frear's rather wonderful BBC film "a day out" about a biking trip from halifax to fountains abbey just before the first world war. you can see this at the bradford NMPFT in their "TV heaven" department. oddly has virginia woolf's granddaughter in it if i remember correctly...

and for hebden bridge - and god, this thread has made me really homesick for it and i only lived there for a year - is the very odd "a boy, a girl and a bike" which is pretty much about just that. very much on the twee side, it does have some moments where the stereotypes pause long enough for the countryside to seap through

Is football cinema?

I think 'Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner' is set in Yorkshire, as is 1974 TV strike classic 'Leeds United' (by writer of 'Scum'). 'This Sporting Life' might be too.

My opening line: "Fuck facey, fuck facey fuck fuck"

loneliness of the long distance runner isnt yorkshire, its nottingham.

is the school in rita sue and bob too Rhodesway?

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