It’s been said that Britain’s favorite fast food isn’t fish and chips, but chicken vindaloo.

There’s been a population of people who trace their lineage to South Asia since at least the 17th century, but the biggest growth began after World War II. Two factors drove the exodus. First, there were families who looked at the options in Partition, of fleeing to one side of the new border between India and Pakistan, and took the third option: move to the UK. But there was also an active policy to encourage people from South Asia to relocate to this tiny island off the coast of Europe, to help fill the shortage of workers after six years of bloodbath.

The ethnic minority population went from 0.1% in 1951 to 2.5% by 1986, and the Pakistani population was the second biggest, eclipsed only by the Indian population.

Yet for many white people, their vision of India was still that of brownface comedies like Carry On Up the Khyber and It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum.

Change came slowly, and often through the appearance of small, family-run Indian restaurants. These became a key part of the economy for these growing migrant communities, and their perception in the broader community.

And there were famous South Asian actors, two of whom star in My Beautiful Laundrette, both of whom had been forced to relocate and reconsider their acting careers. As disillusioned ex-journalist and drunkard Hussein Ali, Roshan Seth was a rising stage actor but kept getting shoved into “ethnic” parts, and quit acting for 25 years until returning for a BAFTA-nominated performance as Jawaharlal Nehru in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. Playing his brother, social climbing entrepreneur Nasser Ali, was Saeed Jaffrey: By contrast to Seth’s interrupted career and late fame, Jaffrey was probably the most recognizable Indian to British audiences after Gandhi, an intercontinental leviathan who worked with Satyajit Ray and Lee Strasberg, and was a cornerstone of Merchant Ivory, masters of high-end period drama.

Merchant Ivory. Their depiction of India was tied up with the Raj, the period of British occupation of India that had only relatively recently ended. Films like Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Bombay Talkie (1970), and Heat and Dust (1980) were often deceptively complex in their depiction of the complicated relationships between South Asia and Britain, even as TV shows like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown (both airing in 1984) leaned heavier into a romanticized version of that history.

But it was rare for art of the era to show the other side of the equation: the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi migrants who had traveled to the UK, established businesses, embraced the Thatcherite dream, and begun to enter the middle classes in a way that was often impossible for other minority groups in the UK. And, yes, had kids who were raised British but were often immersed in their parents’ native culture at home.

It’s these questions of identity that run rich throughout My Beautiful Laundrette, a subtle satire set in London’s Pakistani community, as young Omar (Gordon Warnecke) is pushed off the dole and into a job with his uncle (Jaffrey), to run the dilapidated launderette that he’s acquired. Omar decides to bring in his old school friend, Johnny (a promising young actor called Daniel Day-Lewis. Whatever happened to him?). Drawing on his own experiences as the only Asian boy in all-white schools, scriptwriter Hanif Kureishi made Omar and Johnny’s relationship truly groundbreaking in UK cinema: a queer interracial romance with a happy ending.

But his greatest achievement as a then-young writer may be in channeling his own complicated feelings about Britain through Hussein and Nasser. When the brothers finally reconcile, they can admit why they stay on this soggy little island with its doltish, pallid residents.

Footnote: The same year as My Beautiful Laundrette was released, Jeffrey and Rita Wolf would play father and daughter again in Tandoori Nights, a TV sitcom set in one of those family restaurants.

• My Beautiful Laundrette
• Directed by Stephen Frears
• Starring Gordon Warnecke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, Shirley Anne Field
• 1985
• 97 minutes

Further Listening

• The Buddha of Suburbia by David Bowie (1990)
• Mundian To Bach Ke by Panjabi MC
• Brimful of Asha by Cornershop

Further Viewing

• Bhaji on the Beach (1993) D: Gurinder Chadha
• Mogul Mowgli (2020) D: Bassam Tariq

Further Reading

• Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience by Ziauddin Sardar (2009)
• My Ear at His Heart by Hanif Kureishi (2010)

A Brief History of Manchester

In the beginning, there was Manchester, and it was a bit shit. Then Factory Records happened, and it was glorious for a few sparkling years, and then it all went wrong, and and it was back to being shit again.

A Less Brief History of Manchester

There are cities with a certain indefatigable spirit, one that can overcome all adversity. And then there are others so long on their backs that they know little except how to punch up. That sums up Manchester, a small Roman settlement that is now a conurbation of 2.5 million people in England’s North West, wedged between the Irish Sea and the Pennine Hills, and somehow always perpetually under a rain cloud.

Maybe it’s that constant threat of a downpour that has made Manchester such a uniquely vibrant yet gloomy environment. It’s how come proto-goths Joy Division could, after the death by suicide of front man Ian Curtis, become the often breezily poppy New Order. Or how scumbag junkies the Happy Mondays could, through a cloud of hash and a lake of heroin, fuse Northern Soul, indie rock, and Dub into irresistible dance choons. Or how none of this could have happened – or rather, had the impact it did – without Tony Wilson.

Who?

Know how, on local TV news, there’s that “and finally” bit, where you’ll find out about the newest trends in hats for dogs, or meet the only 90-year-old knife thrower? Tony Wilson was the guy who hosted those. But he was also an erudite and ambitious Mancunian (as the residents of Manchester are called).

Born in the Greater Manchester community of Salford, educated at Cambridge, he had an intellectual prickliness, and would go on to host political and debate shows as Anthony H. Wilson. But as Tony Wilson he was TV’s answer to legendary radio taste maker John Peel, hosting the Vonnegut-referencing show And So It Goes, where Muddy Waters rubbed shoulders with the Sex Pistols.

And it’s the infamous Londoners who spur the events of 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom’s history of Wilson’s greatest creation and greatest folly: Factory Records.

There’s something profoundly Mancunian about its rise and fall. Manchester is a city that has never seemed comfortable with untrammeled success because it knows that life can be brutal. In the shared memory is the Peterloo Massacre: in 1819, cavalry troops of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry smashed into a peaceful gathering of 60,000 protestors campaigning for the right to vote – or at least be heard – butchering 15 people and mutilating around 600 more.

At the same time, Manchester was the true hub of the British industrial revolution: its proximity to coal fields and waterways, its soggy but temperate weather, and its distance from the forces of governance in London. No Manchester, you might say, no modernity.

Put those elements together, and what Manchester has could be seen as a chip on its shoulder. But it’s also always had the leeway to get away with something. Mancunians will strive, with the expectation of failure. What liberation. For the very act of doing to be the success.

So, suitably, the fall of Factory Records was sealed into its very foundations. Wilson was a bundle of hubristic and heartfelt dichotomies, part of a generation of Northern middle class kids who grew up reading Yeats and Keats while The Who played in the background. At the same time, they rubbed shoulders with teens and twenty- somethings working shite jobs for pennies in the shadow of empty cotton mills. Factory and its wholly- owned money pit of a club, the Haçienda, was the intersection: the musicians would make deliberately obtuse references that the audience may or may not get intellectually (they weren’t exactly asking you about the exploits of Buenaventura Durruti in your GCSE school tests) but there was an emotional connection. Then throw some ecstasy into the mix – the drug of choice for the rising rave generation – and Factory became home to avant garde post punks, classical side projects, and club bangers. If Wilson liked it, it happened.

Of course, such arrogance will inevitably implode, and 24 Hour Party People is a glimpse at those 16 glorious years between the Sex Pistols’ gamechanging gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall to Wilson and his cohorts standing in the bankrupt tatters of a dream.

Wisely, director Michael Winterbottom used comedy actors for this farce. Steve Coogan is pitch-perfect as Wilson, while his long time producing and writing partner, John Thomson, is toe-curlingly accurate as an old school TV producer. It’s not just focused on the famous names like Ian Curtis (although Sean Harris gets his harried self-destruction). Factory was a label, so it’s accurate that you have Paddy Considine as New Order manager Rob Gretton, and Andy Srkis as bloated producer and dangerous madman Martin Hannett (the one true genius of the story, as a fourth-wall-shattering Wilson points out). It’s also a purposefully and admittedly unreliable history, even if so many of the figures who were actually there make brief cameos. After all, who could dare imitate walking smokers cough Mark E. Smith of the Fall, or Rowetta, the smooth soul counterpoint in the Mondays to Sean Ryder’s looping wobble of a voice?

And I was there. Or, at least, close by. Living in the miserable, soggy, town of Macclesfield, forever in Manchester’s glowing shadow, this was all baked into the day-to-day. Even if you didn’t go, you knew all about the Haçienda. You shopped for cheap clothes and import records at the same stalls in indoor market Affleck’s Palace as the Inspiral Carpets did. Ian Curtis is literally buried behind my mate’s house (he’s been known to heckle the mourning goths as they place flowers).

And everyone had a good laugh about how the stupid sleeve for Blue Monday meant the label lost money on every copy sold. Because it was so … Mancunian. Only we could lose money on the best-selling 12” of all time.

But what was it that let this all happen? Was it a generational reaction to post-war melancholia? Was it the democratizing influence of TV and radio access? Was it cheap flights on discount airlines from Ringway to Ibiza and its clubs? Tony Wilson would just say: it was Manchester.

• 24 Hour Party People
• Directed by Michael Winterbottom
• Starring Steve Coogan, Paddy Considine, Shirley Henderson, Lennie James, Andy Serkis, John Simm
• 2002
• 117 mins.

Playlist

• Love Will Tear Us Apart Again by Joy Division
• Step On by The Happy Mondays
• Pacific by 808 State
• Blue Monday by New Order
• Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald
  

Further Reading

• The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club by Peter Hook
• Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division by Deborah Curtis
• The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson
  

Further Watching

• Control (2007) D: Anton Corbijn
• Love on the Dole (1941) D: John Baxter
• Oasis: Supersonic (2016) D: Mat Whitecross

Great films are often birthed in on-set catastrophe. The legends surrounding the chaotic filming of Apocalypse Now have become a matter of film legend, part of the mystique. Titanic was so overbudget that it was the film that was supposed to take down not one, but two studios. So it is with Withnail and I, a film so damned from the first moment that the producers almost pulled the plug on what would become arguably the greatest British comedy ever.

Too grim, too miserable, no laughs, no stars. It’s no wonder that Denis O’Brien, co-founder of HandMade Films, almost cancelled production after one day of shooting. Why wouldn’t he? Paul McGann was a hot property off the success of his historical TV drama The Monocled Mutineer, but the Liverpudlian actor (here faking a Home Counties accent) and future Doctor Who was basically silent on set. Instead, he was shuffling through the mud of Cumbria in the far and most rural North of England behind complete newcomer Richard E. Grant, a gaunt and pallid specter with watery eyes rambling obscenities and madness. The only name star and reliable talent, HandMade regular Richard E. Griffiths, was barely in the first half of the script. The studio so soured on the project that writer/director Bruce  Robinson had to pay for his own reshoots.

But, like Apocalypse Now, Withnail and I makes sense in its final form, complete with a narration. Adapting his own unpublished 1969 novel about two out-of-work and intoxicated actors,  Robinson has McGann as the unnamed I (well, his name’s Marwood, but you’d never know) narrate his internal implosion as arrogant Withnail (Grant) drags him for a week in the country.

And how did this all work out for Denis O’Brien? Pretty well, really. HandMade Films had become the backbone of the British film industry, bolstered by the release of Monty Python films and associated projects like Time Bandits and The Missionary, and radical acts of political art like The Long Good Friday. Yet, for its subversive roots, by 1987 it was becoming the establishment, its comedies either pleasantly dated like 1984’s Ealing Studios pastiche A Private Function, or wildly out of touch with broader tastes, like the wildly unfunny Ealing Studios spoof Water. The disastrous attempt to court America with the captivatingly awful Shanghai Surprise.

They were becoming overshadowed by Channel 4 Films, which opened its slate in 1986 with the era-defining nuclear war animated feature When the Wind Blows and blazed through 1987 with provocative and exciting films like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, and John Huston’s swan song, The Dead.

But Withnail and I was not the death rattle of the old guard, being shown up by these new TV upstarts. It was so vibrant, so scum-drenched, booze-sodden, and vital that only carnage cartoonist Ralph Steadman (best known for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson) could possibly do the poster.

This wasn’t a warm and drug-fuzzed look back at the end of the Swinging Sixties. This was a primal howl of self-destruction. Maybe if  Robinson had got the book out as he originally planned (with its much bleaker ending in tact) then maybe it would have had more of that fin de siècle mournfulness. But by filming it after eight years of Margaret Thatcher’s regime, it becomes something of an accusation, summed up in a speech by Griffith as the tragic Uncle Monty. “Shat on by Tories, shoveled up by Labour.” If only the beat generation had got its shit together, the script screams, then maybe it wouldn’t have come down to the film’s ultimate choice between adhering to indulgence dressed as rebellion, or selling out to establishment blandness.

Everything is filthy, decaying, despairing. Swinging London is a cigarette butt smashed into an undercooked egg. Cumbria, portrayed so idyllically in children’s films like Swallows and Amazons, is a mire. The old guard has suffocated rebellion, and the youth clamped those hands around its own neck.

But, by its very existence, Withnail and I showed a spark of very British insurrection still burned.

• Withnail and I
• Directed by: Bruce Robinson
• Starring: Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard E. Griffiths
• 1987
• 107 minutes

Playlist

• He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by The Hollies (1969)
• Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks (1967)

Further Viewing

• The Knack …and How to Get It (1965) D: Richard Lester
• The Party’s Over (1965) D: Guy Hamilton
• Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) D: Karel Reisz

Further Reading

• London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (2000)
• Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (2014)