#8 Life Is Sweet

Plus: patronising Martin Parr, hun culture comedy and the greatest obs-doc of the past decade

I had been meaning to read Among The Thugs, American writer Bill Buford’s account of his time semi-embedded in a British football firm for ages, but I was reminded of it again last year by a podcast called The English Disease (such a great name) about the modern football hooligan.

Anyway: I did read it. And I do understand the appeal: Buford is a brilliant writer and in 1990 when the book was published his subject was a particularly pressing one. His account of meeting and talking to - but mainly drinking with - hooligans spans most of the 1980s, when such men terrorised towns across Europe whilst being subject to dehumanising treatment themselves at matches (this is the era of Hillsborough and Heysel). Via his neutral outsider schtick, Buford gains the confidences of the invariably disgusting, ugly, pale and often fat supporters he meets (these physical attributes are essentially what distinguishes them from their continental counterparts) as he tries - and largely fails - to find rhyme or reason for their rioting and generally vile behaviour. You are left merely with the sense that these men require violence in peacetime, so use the pretext of national and team pride to slake that thirst.

It’s interesting to see a British archetype crystallise from a slight distance, yet the book is oppressively of its era in its neutrality - part of it covers the overlap between football and the far-right, and although Burford is repulsed by the ideology, he seems to believe that the best way to puncture the National Front disco he attends alongside a young Nick Griffin is with an entirely comic portrayal. (More viscerally heinous, however, is a passage about a group of hooligans sexually assaulting a woman with learning difficulties which disturbed me for weeks.)

As much as the book has stayed with me, I certainly wasn’t expecting to be thinking about Among The Thugs when I decided to rewatch Life Is Sweet, Mike Leigh’s north London-set domestic comedy-drama, also released in 1990. Some films you remember, some films you remember only how you felt watching them for the first time. For me, Life Is Sweet belongs firmly in the latter category - when I saw it as a teenager, I was utterly agog at how evocatively it captured a 1990s British summer in suburbia: that nebulously giddy holiday atmosphere, the shocks of irritation intensified by the oppressive heat, people making a fuss over the arrival of exotic fruits (a pineapple features heavily here) and an almost high-pitched kind of silence that I always associate with empty summer days (that one might just be me). Plot-wise, the main thing that stuck in my mind was the film’s portrayal of a mother-daughter-daughter relationship: Alison Steadman plays Wendy, a woman whose non-stop inane chit chat is dominated by the offhand mockery of those around her, specifically her daughters, tomboy plummer Natalie (a practically unrecognisable Claire Skinner of Outnumbered fame) and her rude, right-on and very mentally fragile twin sister Nicola (Jane Horrocks), who suffers from depression and bulimia. The domestic sphere is a hotbed of affectionate insults and despite Nicola’s screeching disgust at family life, there’s often a comfort to be found in this portrayal of absolute familiarity. But the family dynamic is also steeped in passive aggression and repression, a cloud that finally lifts once Wendy and Nicola finally have a frank and very moving - if not totally cathartic - conversation about maternal love.

What I had completely forgotten about was the men. We have Wendy’s husband Andy (Jim Broadbent), a professional chef who buys a clapped-out old burger van from his friend Patsy (Stephen Rea) in the hope of making his fortune by selling meat to crowds at White Hart Lane (Jim and Patsy are both Spurs supporters). The football fandom element was what initially got me thinking about Among The Thugs, but the more I watched, the more it became clear that Life Is Sweet is one of the great portrayals of the late 20th century British male as a pathetic, delusional and vaguely menacing figure. Andy himself is belligerent and at one point gets frighteningly drunk - Wendy calls him a lager lout and for once she’s not laughing. Yet much of the plot revolves around Wendy and Andy’s friend Aubrey (Timothy Spall), a misguided man with an Americana fixation who finds it difficult to laugh at himself and certainly can’t see the funny side of his horrendous new restaurant (the perennial British-food-is-disgusting theme goes into overdrive here thanks to such dishes as liver in lager, prawns in jam sauce, clams and ham and chilled brains). Wendy kindly helps out on the restaurant’s opening night, but the evening is not a success: Aubrey gets extremely drunk and ends up making an aggressive pass at Wendy, who (expertly) redirects her verbal diarrhoea towards diffusing the situation. Then you have Nicola’s boyfriend (David Thewlis) who - after considerable baiting from her - eventually reveals his deep-seated misogyny by ranting about her being a dumb bimbo.

I love Life Is Sweet for its ludicrously faithful evocation of ordinary British life; the tonal and sensory veracity of this film is mindblowing. But looking back I couldn’t help tuning into an undercurrent of repressed masculine rage that seems to justify Nicola’s hatred of men (despite the fact this is presumably meant to be comically OTT; she tells her sister that “all men are bastards” and “potential rapists”) and Natalie’s metamorphosis into an equanimous and unthreatening man. There’s an outward air of amused, lazy docility - a lower middle-class version of country house banter - that cloaks a simmering and quite scary sense of frustrated male entitlement. There is little actual violence in Life Is Sweet - but we still know we are in the England of the thugs.

NOTES & RECS

• Recently, whenever I’ve had the rare opportunity to watch something non-work related in the evenings (I know, the tragedy of the part-time TV critic) I have gone directly to 24 Hours In Police Custody. I used to watch it religiously, and while the gobsmacking investigations and general true-crime thrills are still core to its appeal, nowadays the programme seems to be less about crime and more about using criminal cases to paint a series of extremely bleak portraits of deprived, drug-ravaged towns in Britain - this is not just about financial poverty, but a poverty of meaning too. I am also quite obsessed by the wryly polite chit-chat - sometimes even weather-based! - between police and suspects: the recordings of the drives to the station often feel like Britishness in a nutshell. (Sidenote: the first instalment of Adolescence is basically a one-shot episode of 24 Hours In Police Custody, it must have been an influence.)

• I heartily recommend The 80s: Photographing Britain at the Tate Britain (until 5 May), a survey of landscapes, self-portraiture and documentary photography (with an emphasis on protest and social justice) united by a characteristically 1980s tonal irreverence. Obviously, there is a lot of Martin Parr - including his lesser-seen photos of toffs - but the show is also an education in his contemporaries, like Anna Fox (above), Sunil Gupta and Dennis Morris, who were doing similar things but with slightly less wink-wink wryness and a toned-down sense of class tourism (also v interesting to contrast Parr with Paul Reas, whose application of an American aesthetic to UK life crystallises what makes Parr and co feel so British in the first place). I personally love Parr’s photographs: I know they get a bad rap for being patronising (the same accusation is often leveled at Leigh) but surely you’d have to be very socially distanced from the normalcy they portray to be viewing his subjects with an outright sneer.

• Hale and Pace, Jason Orange, Top Gear, Melinda Messenger, Robson Green, Fleet services, Carol McGiffin, Byker Grove, Little Chef, Noel Edmonds, John McCririck, Tesco meal deals, Girls Aloud, Lorraine Kelly, Bargain Hunt, Alison Hammond, Four In A Bed, Balamory, Hollyoaks Later. Am I painting you a picture? I’ve noticed so many comedies making references to lowbrow British culture of the past couple of decades a bedrock of their humour recently: this is a collection of names dropped by Big Boys, Smoggie Queens, Gavin and Stacey: The Finale and Am I Being Unreasonable? There is a big overlap with hun culture here, mention of which has been edited out of multiple articles I’ve written because apparently nobody knows what it is… Essentially, it’s an unserious but not ironic celebration of high-street-glam British B-list celebs - soap stars, manufactured pop stars, daytime TV presenters - and slightly crap British pleasures (this is a good explainer). A lot of comforting nostalgia, camp bathos and a semi-radical lack of pretension, basically. Anyway, if the above means anything to you at all then I recommend all those shows (especially Am I Being Unreasonable?).