Filmmaker Alan Clarke was the son of a Liverpool insurance salesman.
He worked as a labourer and then attempted to be a salesman before spending
two years in Hong Kong as part of his National Service. After taking
courses in acting and directing in Canada, he returned to England to
take up a post with ITV before moving to the BBC in 1969.
Much of Clarke's work remained for TV, but he was responsible for two
confronting films of rough working-class life, notably the graphic Borstal
exposé, Scum
(1979, from TV play) starring a young Ray
Winstone, and the exploration of teenage sex on a Bradford housing
estate, Rita,
Sue and Bob Too (1987). Another notable hard-hitting slice of realism
was Made in Britain (1982), scripted by David Leland and starring Tim
Roth as Trevor, an unrepentant racist skinhead.
His final TV film starred, The Firm (1988), starred Gary
Oldman and was an abrasive vision of football violence and, by extension,
a critique of Thatcherism and her comments on society. He favoured an
apparently detached, `documentary' film-making style, but this in no
way lessened his impact of his uncompromising and innovative films.
He died of cancer in 1990.
