‘It’s wild and it’s fierce and it’s not bothered about anybody...’
Growing up in South Yorkshire means you rarely get to see yourself represented on screen. Sure, we’ve got the work of Sean Bean and The Full Monty, but aside from that, the most famous instances of South Yorkshire appearing onscreen originate from author and playwright Barry Hines. The Hoyland writer wrote Threads, the incredibly grim exploration of the aftermath of a nuclear war (set in Sheffield), but perhaps most famously, it was his book Kestrel for a Knave that led to Ken Loach’s beloved adaptation Kes in 1969. I first saw Kes as a kid (the best time to see it), and I didn’t realise at the time how unusual it was to see people who sounded like my dad and his family (all of whom are from Barnsley) represented on the big screen. Returning to it now, on the cusp of turning 40 and with a child of my own, I found it to be almost unbearably nostalgic, but also powerful and tragic and beautiful…
Billy Casper (David Bradley) has it tough. Ignored by his mother (Lynne Perrie), berated by his teachers and victimised by his tyrannical older brother, Jud (Freddie Fletcher), he finds solace in a baby kestrel who he trains to be his companion. This being Barnsley in the sixties, a town utterly dominated by the coal mining industry, the future looks fairly bleak for young Casper and his ilk.
Despite being released 18 years before I was born (the film premiered in my hometown of Doncaster, no less), I recognised much of Casper’s childhood here. While I had a much more comfortable upbringing than he did, I knew most of the characters he encounters in my own childhood: the maniacal PE teacher, the class clown, the overzealous newsagent… As ever, Loach does a fantastic job in capturing the nuances and peccadilloes of life in a working class northern town, aided by the casting of non-professional actors, particularly Bradley, whose performance here is widely regarded as one of the most compelling debut performances in the history of British cinema, and Fletcher, who delivers an utterly absorbing turn as the film’s monstrous antagonist. Growing up in South Yorkshire in the ’90s I was surrounded by Jud’s. I would watch them preening and flexing in the pub as a child while I sat with my glass of coke and bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Heady days.
One of Loach’s great strengths in his depiction of the working classes is his ability to capture the gallows humour that accompanies a life of struggle. There are many laugh-out-loud moments within Kes, but that doesn’t make the eventual and inevitable tragedy at the film’s conclusion any less powerful or moving. It’s a difficult tonal balancing act but Loach provides the canvas for his cast to paint something beautiful. Using amateur actors and allowing plenty of improvisation lends the film an authenticity that is still striking all these years later. It’s also worth noting that the football sequence, led by a majestic performance from Brian Glover, is one of the finest depictions of the beautiful game ever depicted to film.
Kes is rightly seen as a landmark of British cinema and because it taps into the kind of universal teenage experiences that define the very best coming-of-age stories, it will probably remain in the cultural conversation forever. It deserves to.
