TwentyFourSeven

Bob Hoskins - Alan Darcy
Danny Nussbaum - Tim
Bruce Jones - Tim's Dad
Annette Badland - Tim's Mother
Justin Brady - Gadget
James Hooton - Knighty
Darren O. Campbell - Daz

Shane Meadows directorial debut turned out to be arguably one of the best films of 1997, this low-budget tale denounces Margaret Thatcher's 1980s social legacy and its uncaring repercussions on England's suburbs.

Shot in black and white and based in the East Midlands, Bob Hoskins is excellent in the lead role of Alan Darcy, a burnt out soccer coach whose past history is told in a series of flashbacks through his diary. Darcy becomes a self-appointed social worker who opens up a dormant boxing club with the financial assistance of shady businessman Ronnie Marsh (Frank Harper). He hopes to train a team of local teenage no-hopers into becoming boxers; Darcy is optimistic that the challenge of attaining peak psychical fitness will guide them on a path away from a life of twenty-four seven drugs and despair. After a group bonding session in the Welsh mountains they return for a climatic boxing match against a rival club, when the pressure of cynicism explodes violence from within Darcy he self-destructs and destroys everything he had striven to achieve. The films finale is a hopeful postscript which leaves open the possibility that perhaps all Darcy’s work had not been in vain.