An Era of Discontent: 'Made in Britain' (1982)

(Blog written Summer, 2018)

(Made in Britain)

By the end of the 1970s the British economy was in severe stagnation, punk blazed in the disenfranchised underbelly of Britain, and across the country debilitating strikes took place on a regular basis. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher came to power and soon implemented monetarism, began to privatise industries, and was well on the way to achieve her neo-liberal dream. It was in this period that mass unemployment gripped the country, and the working-class youth’s options to “climb the social ladder” were receding (Evans, 1999). In 1982, Alan Clarke made a TV film called Made in Britain that, although short, powerfully encapsulates this era of discontent.

Tim Roth plays Trevor, a skin head with a hatred for any sort of institution. Furthermore, he has racist, neo-Nazi views to go along with it. Clarke’s handheld tracking shots (a trademark of his work) follows this figure of pure anger and hatred through endless corridors swinging viciously with his movements, like a shark mauling at its prey. Here, Clarke presents a figure that has no wish to exist in Thatcher’s Britain. Upon going to the job centre, there is only drab work with poor pay, and in response Trevor hurls a brick through the window in an incredible rage that never turns off. Clarke here reflects the time poignantly, cathartic for any unemployed person on the dole, and representative of the sense of hopelessness that typified mass unemployment in the 1980s. Through his dedication to cinema verite and social realism, Clarke creates a whole film swallowed in this mood. Tracking shot after tracking shot, social worker after social worker, it stays true only to visual hopelessness and soulless nihilism. Although one may criticise the films refusal to search for a solution to this melancholy, it is precisely this denial of a solution that realistically expresses the era. It is, like My Beautiful Launderette (Frears, 1985) or The Long Good Friday (Mackenzie, 1981), a time capsule of Thatcher's Britain.