Billy Liar

[tartanfilm]

Just so. I loved that such a well crafted story was told in an hour. And Charles Gray doing what he did best. Lunch & co.

[Rowdon]

Dave Rattigan. Man. Investigator. Photographer. Superstar.



Great work.

[Dave Rattigan]

Haha. Thanks, Rowdon.



There are more photographs of Billy Liar Bradford locations here. They're hastily uploaded, so they're not ordered or labelled, but you'll get the idea!

[Rowdon]

That is a beautiful website! It's so nice to see that nobody has died in Bradford since 1962!



By the way - that grab of Billy seeing how far he can walk with his eyes closed, in front of the church; that may be the most representative still of 60s British cinema that I've ever seen. It would make a great poster!





(But the BFI plaque classifying Billy Liar as a Swinging Sixties film? As Torquemada would say, "Oh dear".)

[wadey]

One of my all-time favorite films.

I agree, everything about it is wonderful, I also love The Family Way but the house interiors weren't quite right

[Dave Rattigan]

(But the BFI plaque classifying Billy Liar as a Swinging Sixties film? As Torquemada would say, "Oh dear".)

I dunno. I thought it quite epitomized the era. And those scenes of Julie Christie skipping down the street to the music of Richard Rodney Bennett - very swinging sixties!

[Rowdon]

Ok - maybe "The film that set the sixties swinging".

[wadey]

Dave, thanks for the superb "Then and Now" photos

[Dave Rattigan]

You're welcome, Wadey. If you do a search of the forums, you'll find where I did the same for Whistle Down the Wind locations.

[DB7]

Billy Liar – still in town

Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in the film version of Billy Liar ‘A grasping of freedom, a rejection of convention’ . . . Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie in the film version of Billy Liar.



'I don't think about Billy Liar very often." Tom Courtenay's voice hovers on the line. We have been discussing his upcoming holiday to the north-east coast, splashing about in the warm shallows of the present-day; at this detour into the past, he pauses, and retreats a little. "If I read it now, it would make me laugh," he concludes lightly, distantly. "But I honestly don't know why it's lasted. Who can say why some things are successful?"



It is now 50 years since Keith Waterhouse's novel transferred to the stage, casting in its title role first Albert Finney and later, Courtenay. Published in 1959, Billy Liar has, over those five decades, enjoyed a rich and varied existence, remembered not only as a novel and a play, but also as a film (again starring Courtenay), a musical and a TV series. This Saturday will see it revived once more, in a lavish stage adaptation at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.



Crucially, Billy Liar's longevity is not an example of a tale that is told and told again with a dulling faithfulness; rather, the long life of Billy Liar is a story of reincarnation, of each new generation seizing upon the tale afresh and making the story its own. Its influence may be felt in half a century of creative endeavour, in drama and literature and film, and, perhaps most keenly, in popular music: referenced, for instance, in the video for the Oasis single The Importance of Being Idle, and in a song by the Decemberists, and popping up, too, in many of Morrissey's lyrics, including the Smiths' 1984 hit William, It Was Really Nothing.



Set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Stradhoughton, Billy Liar tells of a young undertaker's clerk named William "Billy" Fisher. Billy, still living at home with his parents, is bored with his small-town existence, and in an effort to bring a little colour to his life tells lies – from the trifling and relatively inconsequential (the goings-on in the mythical world of Ambrosia, for instance), to the overblown, compulsive whoppers (this rather loose grasp of the truth leads him to be simultaneously engaged to two women).



Meanwhile, Billy dreams of moving away to the city and becoming a successful comedy writer – though he has yet to summon the courage to actually do anything about it. "Today's a day of big decisions," he announces at one point. "Going to start writing me novel – 2,000 words every day. Going to start getting up in the morning." And then he looks at his overgrown thumbnail. "I'll cut that for a start," he decides. "Yes . . . today's a day of big decisions." It is a story that is funny, and familiar, but also tremendously sad, and not without sweetness.



"It's terribly exciting, in lots of ways, to unearth this beautiful play, to unearth beautifulness every day in rehearsal," says Nick Bagnall, director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse production of Billy Liar. It is, he points out, now a year since the death of Waterhouse, and so a revival of the play (co-written by Willis Hall, who died in 2005) seems a fine tribute. And that it has enjoyed such longevity and so much reinterpretation should not come as a surprise, Bagnall believes. "The language is warm and muscular, it's tender, and honest. And the character of Billy Liar is one that we all have inside us."



For all Courtenay's reticence, his passion for the character of Billy is still tangible. He took on the role at the age of 23, a young actor who had himself left Yorkshire to pursue his own dreams. "I'd seen Billy Liar more than once," he says. "I loved it. It was something I knew about. It was a graphic illustration of how we lived. Billy Liar was in every molecule of my body."



Courtenay's own upbringing, as a working-class boy from Hull, was not wildly different to that of Billy. "It was such fun to talk in a language I could understand," he says of the broad, everyday talk found in Waterhouse and Hall's script. "The most graphic speech is the speech about being grateful," he remembers. "I couldn't get it out when I did it on stage . . ." Courtenay falls quiet for a moment. "Because I was always told about being grateful, too. I'm sure I'm the only boy from my primary school to have gone to university. I know I was the only boy on my street. But my parents wanted me to be educated. They didn't want me to work on the docks; people who worked on the docks would say, 'If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for my son!' But my father, he didn't want it to be good enough for me."



To return Billy Liar to Yorkshire is a feat that has brought Bagnall much delight. "This area owns this play," he says firmly. Bagnall left Yorkshire when he was 16, hoping to pursue his own creative ambitions. "I think if I'd seen this play, then I'd have left the next day," he says. He recalls a scene from the play in which Liz, the most bohemian of Billy's girlfriends, tells him to leave town and follow his dreams. "She says to him, 'All you need to do is go to the train station and go.' And he says, 'Is it that simple?'" Bagnall sounds flummoxed. "I still feel it shocking that he doesn't go."



In the 1963 film adaptation, directed by John Schlesinger, the role of Liz was played by Julie Christie. It was only Christie's third acting job; she filled the shoes of Topsy Jane, who was forced to leave filming when she became ill. "It was my lucky break," Christie recalls. "Without it, who knows what I would have been doing?" She remembers the film fondly, and also with a certain respect. "As a film, I think it was historically and socially very perceptive," she says. "It captured that strange period between the end of postwar austerity and the start of what became known as the 60s, with all the hedonism that involved and which my character represented. It was a grasping of freedom, a rejection of convention that she stood for and which people were all having to grapple with at the time. Billy – in the book and the film – couldn't quite make the break. What John did was capture that moment perfectly."



It is that rejection of convention that perhaps lies at the heart of Billy Liar's enduring success. It was, of course, part of a wider movement, Billy sitting alongside the working-class heroes found in the Angry Young Men plays, novels and later, films, such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; works that challenged what Bagnall terms "the pretty, establishment plays, the plays that refused to acknowledge that we'd even been in a war". He compares Billy Liar to the famous shot from Kes, the adaptation of Barry Hines's Kestrel for a Knave: "Where he's trying to stick two fingers up at the establishment. It's kind of punk."



Colin Meloy, lead singer and songwriter of the Decemberists, is in agreement. "Billy Liar totally embodies the rock spirit," he insists. "But it's also blessed with none of the earnestness of the 60s counter-cultural movement – let's tear it all down, with our tongues in our cheeks."



Bombast and bravado



In 2004 Meloy wrote a song he named Billy Liar that appeared on the Oregon band's first album. "At that time in my life I was just eating up all the Angry Young Men movies — it was really the peak of my anglophilia, and it's such a funny movie, and it's kind of revolutionary." The story of Billy struck a particular chord with Meloy. "I was in my mid-20s and like the Tom Courtenay character, working a dumb job – not as a clerk but in a pizza parlour. And, like him, I was chafing against authority, and burdened by an overactive imagination. The song I wrote is more about the spirit of the movie; it's about being a waylaid youth with too much time on our hands and not enough power. It's a paean to laziness."



Oftentimes, the story of Billy Liar strikes me more like a song than anything else. Like so many rock'n'roll tracks, it is essentially a story about escape; about love and dreams, and the search for them both, and with them, too, the search for oneself. It is about telling stories with bombast and bravado and the half-belief that if you say it, it will become true. More, it is a story of youth, and of a generation coming to believe that it is different from the last. And perhaps this is why it is a story that has survived so well these past 50 years – arriving alongside a youth movement that recognised in Waterhouse's story something of its own spirit.



Waterhouse wrote a sequel, but I ask Meloy what he thinks would have happened to the Billy in the play, a young man full of fire and vigour and ambition, yet too scared to get on a train. "How would Billy Liar have turned out?" Meloy laughs and thinks a while. "Well," he say, "I guess he would have turned out like the punk movement . . . you know, it kind of fizzled out."

[cumberbatches_woman]

this film is one of the all time classics, Tom Courtney is in superb form, i always remember the scene with the vase in Shadracks office when all he says is loooooooooooooose then starts coughing, i think the film was far better than the series with Jeff Rawle, somehow he couldnt match Courtneys character.

[Rowdon]

I was looking for a clip when I came across this. I don't know why I played it because I 'knew' it was going to be awful, but I'm glad I did, because I was so wrong. It's not quite modern, not quite old-fashioned, and the two actors are really good. Especially Chloe Mander: "You're rotten to me, Billy" really nails it.
Take three minutes.

[wadey]

Thanks for that, strange to think that Keith Waterhouse has died since the thread was started