Latest news with #ShaneMeadows
BBC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Upcoming Shane Meadows film a 'visual love letter' to Skegness
An upcoming Shane Meadows film will be a "visual love letter" to his favourite holiday resort, the acclaimed director said. Meadows, known for titles including This is England and The Gallows Pole, recently stopped to talk to local artist John Byford while filming on the beach in a video shared by Mr Byford online, he revealed the road trip film is called Chalk and tells the story of two girls travelling from Margate to Edinburgh."When I was a young boy from Uttoxeter we had a family friend that had a static caravan up at Ingoldmells," he said. "It was a council-run site, so a lot of my youth was here, and I've got nothing but the fondest memories of Skegness."The director said it was an "honour" to be back in the area and said it would be his "proudest moment" if the film could be premiered in the town. The resort was the first place on the map he wanted to start the filming process, he added."I never thought that I'd get to come back and film here", he said. "So I wanted to write a little, if you like, a visual love letter to my favourite holiday resort."The crew have been seen filming donkey rides on the beach and around the Byford described his encounter with Meadows as an "absolutely brilliant experience" and said he was looking forward to seeing the to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Northern Youth film season to feature This is England, East is East
A Bradford-born director is curating a season of films dedicated to northern youth culture. From May 31 to June 13, the National Science and Media Museum's Pictureville Cinema will host Northern Youth, a season of films curated by Bradford-born director Dominic Leclerc (Sex Education, Shameless, Skins). The season's theme reflects Bradford's status as the UK's youngest city by population, with 26 per cent of residents aged under 18. Northern Youth will place a spotlight on young northern characters in British cinema. The season opens with the coming-of-age drama How to Have Sex (2023) on Friday, May 30. Other highlights include Shane Meadows' This is England (2006), and a Northern Youth spin on Pictureville's Classic Sunday strand with a screening of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962). In June, comedy-drama East is East (1999), which was partially filmed in Bradford, will be screened thanks to a partnership between Pictureville and the British Independent Film Awards. East is East explores the tensions of a family navigating identity, tradition, and rebellion in 1970s Northern England. The Long Day Closes (1992), a semi-autobiographical film from Terence Davies which captures a working-class teenager's inner world in postwar Liverpool, will screen on Sunday, June 8. Other films include West Yorkshire rural drama, My Summer of Love (2004), exploring themes of class and teenage desire, and Control (2007), a portrait of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, capturing "the youthful intensity of his brief life and tragic end in haunting black-and-white." Further details, including guest speakers and additional events, will be announced in the coming weeks. For more information and to book tickets, visit
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Working-class creatives don't stand a chance in UK today, leading artists warn
Artists, directors and actors have raised the alarm about what they describe as a rigged system preventing working-class talent thriving in their industries after analysis showed almost a third of major arts leaders were educated privately. The creator of Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight, the director Shane Meadows and the Turner prize winner Jesse Darling were among those who spoke to the Guardian about what was described as a crisis facing the sector. They spoke after a Guardian survey of the 50 organisations that receive the most Arts Council England funding revealed a disproportionate number of leadership roles were occupied by people who were educated privately and those who went to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. Almost a third (30%) of artistic directors and other creative leaders were educated privately compared with a national average of 7%. More than a third (36%) of the organisations' chief executives or other executive directors went to private schools. The analysis also found that 17.5% of artistic directors and more than a quarter (26%) of chief executives went to Oxford or Cambridge, compared with less than 1% of the general population. Andy Haldane, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, said he was 'shocked by that finding but not especially surprised'. Haldane, who is a former chief economist at the Bank of England, said: 'As one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy, the creative industries will need to do a much better job of nurturing socioeconomic mobility to realise their potential.' The Guardian was able to find information for 76 leadership roles at 49 of the 50 organisations. Research by the Sutton Trust has highlighted a stark overrepresentation in the arts for those from the most affluent backgrounds, which it defined as 'upper middle-class backgrounds'. The report found that 43% of Britain's best-selling classical musicians and 35% of Bafta-nominated actors were alumni of private schools. Among classical musicians, 58% had attended university, as well as 64% of top actors. Researchers found a less stark divide in pop music, where only 8% of artists were educated privately and 20% university-educated, both close to the national averages. The number of UK students taking arts subjects has also plummeted in recent years, leading to what the Guardian dubbed a 'creativity crisis' in state schools. Since 2010, enrolment in arts GCSEs has fallen by 40% and the number of arts teachers has declined by 23%. Research last year found that about half of all A-level students took at least one humanities subject a decade ago. But by 2021-22, that had fallen to 38%, with the proportion taking arts subjects such as music, design and media studies dropping to 24%. Figures from across arts and culture told the Guardian that perceptions of the sector as inaccessible to working-class people and the rising cost of being an artist were discouraging a generation from trying to establish themselves in creative industries. 'I think the real problem is that working-class people look at the arts and think this isn't something that people like me do,' said Knight. 'There is a perception across the board that there is something about the arts that is unattainable.' Meadows, the director of This Is England, said the kind of schemes and courses to which he had access as a young artist were now too rare. 'The projects that existed and were open to me have vanished from so many places,' he said. Michael Socha, who starred recently in the Meadows drama The Gallows Pole and got his start in acting via the Television Workshop in Nottingham, said the middle-class environment of film and TV in the UK could be difficult to navigate. 'There's a lot of impostor syndrome sometimes,' he said. 'When I get a job, like a big job, I often get quite intimidated by how elitist it is.' Happy Valley's showrunner, Sally Wainwright, said: 'When I was a kid, I remember my dad saying to me: 'People like us don't become writers.' He was a headteacher and a senior lecturer at a polytechnic, but he still thought that people like us didn't make money out of writing.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Recent research by Netflix found that nine in 10 working-class parents would discourage their children from pursuing a career in film and television because they did not see it as a viable career. The artist Larry Achiampong said access to higher education in the arts was too expensive and an 'impossibility' for many. 'When you look at the rates that people must pay to get on degree-level courses and above, it's no wonder that many drop off during said courses or even afterwards should they graduate. The game is rigged.' Darling, the 2023 Turner prize winner, said the wider issue of access to the arts for working-class people was rooted in a lack of government support and the shrinking of the welfare state. 'The problem with arts participation and diversity is that there is no welfare state any more,' he said. 'The Britpop acts and the Young British Artists didn't pay for school, they lived on the dole and had housing benefits – that was their government patronage. 'Now there's wage labour and the housing crisis, and the welfare state has become increasingly difficult to access. I was able to access the last gasps of that system, including working tax credits, while university loans hadn't ballooned to the amounts we see now.' The award-winning playwright Beth Steel said she was able to get a foothold in the world of theatre by securing a place as a live-in property guardian in London where her rent, including bills, was £135 a month. That allowed her to work on her breakthrough play, Wonderland, about the mining community in Nottinghamshire where she was raised. 'It is still very rare to have contemporary regional working-class voices on these big main stages, unless it's nostalgic,' she said. 'People need to see something of themselves to think there is a possibility that they can also do that.' Steel added that schemes such as Theatre 503 that she was part of need to be better-funded to allow playwrights from working-class backgrounds to focus solely on writing. Mark Simpson, the composer and clarinettist who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2006, said the reduction in local and national government-supported schemes meant someone from his roots would struggle to break through in the classical world today. 'The limitations now that kids from my background face are almost too high to get through,' he said. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, said: 'Who tells the story determines the story that is told. So if you don't have a diverse workforce in the arts world, then too many people's stories will be erased from our national story … As a government, we're absolutely determined that that is going to change.' An Arts Council England spokesperson said: 'We're very aware that people seeking to forge careers in the arts can face a range of barriers, and that social class is one of them. Our own data shows clearly that the better off are better represented in the workforce.' But they said they were confident 'progress could be made' and ACE has started to track social mobility within the organisations it funds.
The Independent
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Stephen Graham is right. Television has forgotten how funny working-class people are
In an interview at the weekend, the actor Stephen Graham said that British television misrepresents what it's like to be working class in this country. 'It's very condescending,' he said, pinpointing TV's 'Ooh, look at the poor!' habit of portraying working-class life as one long, grim struggle. 'Things can be hard, but there's also a lot of laughter. My childhood was full of it.' His words struck a chord. I've been banging on for years about the fact that television has forgotten, thanks to the way that it's now almost monocultural, how hilarious working-class people are. When I was a kid, extended family made our house feel like a stop on a never-ending stand-up tour. Great aunts, uncles, cousins, each brought their own brand of humour that would just fill up our living room. We would laugh so much. Being teased by adults and learning how to hold your own was just part of growing up. The first time I found myself in a culture defined by an agglomeration of middle- and upper-middle-class folk – Fleet Street – it was a massive shock. They communicated with each other completely differently. It felt like being forced into a collar that was so tight it was cutting off your air supply, having to talk in your best 'telephone voice' for eight hours a day. I had to learn it like a foreign language. Of course, I discovered they were witty, too, but in an entirely different tonal range. I still think of something Shane Meadows said when I interviewed him in 2015. The director of This Is England, whose mum worked in a fish and chip shop and whose dad was a long-distance lorry driver, has mobilised a small army of working-class talent that includes Graham, Vicky McClure, Paddy Considine, Joseph Gilgun and Jack O'Connell. When asked what he thought he'd have done had his 1996 short film Small Time not won an award that set him on the road to a filmmaking career, he said he'd probably still be 'concreting... being one of three or four lads going around in a van'. He loved the stories and the humour, and he knew that he was a natural storyteller – he'd have been 'one of those guys in the pub' making people laugh because of his 'knack for remembering the lunacy or the violence or the funny thing'. Meadows made it through the eye of a needle to be a filmmaker – working-class representation in film and television shrinks and shrinks (it now stands at around 8 per cent across the board). So many men and women like the This Is England creator will still be out there, all over the country, 'concreting' or working at the hairdresser's, telling their stories, making everyone laugh. But they're less and less likely to be creating what we see on our TV screens. That wasn't always the case. Before the moneyed classes had all the entry routes into film and television pretty much sewn up, there was evidence everywhere you looked. There was Johnny Speight, who left school at 14, writing Till Death Us Do Part (1965-75); former plasterer's apprentice Ray Galton and milkman's son Alan Simpson writing Steptoe and Son (1962-74); John Sullivan (dad a plumber, mum a charlady) writing Only Fools and Horses (1981-2003). Yes, I know, that's a list of white men, but that's a different and equally important conversation about those times and now. Some of the funniest people I've ever met have been working-class women who would not even have dreamt that they could turn their natural gift into a career. Laura Checkley and Hannah Chissick's brilliant The Proper Class Podcast ('celebrating all things working class, because if we don't who the hell will') shows how hard even the most successful have had to fight to overcome stereotyping and barriers against progress. (They would have had fun, I'm sure, chatting to The Royle Family 's co-creator Caroline Aherne, who left a big hole when she died in 2016.) It is still possible to make it, of course, as In My Skin writer Kayleigh Llewellyn and the Bafta-winning creator of I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel, have shown. Coel was raised by her mother, who worked as a cleaner while studying to become a mental health nurse. Both writers have brought new perspectives to their craft. That's not to say that writers from ordinary backgrounds are entirely blameless for what you might call the Ken Loach-ification of the working-class experience. Dramatists like Loach, whose father was an electrician in a tool factory, are from a generation for whom a grammar-school education could lead to unheard-of social mobility. Political ideals and social conscience drew Loach and others back to the inequality they had left behind. Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) is probably the high-water mark of socially committed drama from that generation, but the tang of desperation it left behind of the working-class experience under Margaret Thatcher's ruthless, free-market policies seems to have found its way into almost every depiction since. There are still working-class writers, actors and filmmakers out there – from Andrea Arnold to James Graham to Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, whose series A Thousand Blows, about a Victorian pugilist, Stephen Graham is about to star in. But there just aren't enough to create a genuinely broad picture of what life is like outside of the 'big kitchen dramas' that make wealth itself part of the appeal of what's on screen. No one wants to be prescriptive about what any writer should be creating – Jed Mercurio's father worked as a coal miner, but he writes blazing thrillers, and hallelujah for that. But if you don't have a broad enough spread of writers, stereotypes take hold. Downbeat (and beaten down) is only a small part of the story of British working-class life, but it's what we see more of than anything else. It's time to change that.
