Ken Loach's 'Work Of Fiction' Is A Modern Masterpiece
Plus What's On In Yorkshire Sep 30- Oct 6: The Woozy Edition
In the old days, I went for decades without a vaccination. But, since Covid happened, about twice a year I’ve obediently allowed the government to stick a needle in my arm.
And so it was that yesterday I lined up at my local pharmacy, along with a dozen pensioners and assorted frail people, to have the latest Covid booster.
And let me warn you — this one has a sting in the tail. At least, it did for me. Within three hours I was mysteriously drowsy and ached all over — especially in the relevant arm. There was nothing for it but to go to bed very early, and justify my Disney subscription by catching up on the latest editions of Welcome To Wrexham. (Apologies, ‘real’ lower-league football fans, but I really love that programme.)
I’m at the head of the queue to get my jabs early now because I’m a ‘frontline healthcare professional’. As such I am under no illusion that my role is strictly administrative. I am not allowed to make clinical judgements. This contrasts with the ‘healthcare professional’ in Ken Loach’s Palme D’Or-winning 2016 film I, Daniel Blake. She’s an outsourced apparatchik employed by an American company to second-guess the opinion of a qualified doctor. The real, but unspoken, aim is not to arrive at a correct assessment of capacity to work but to reduce the number of people drawing UK sickness benefit.
As it happens, for a few weeks in 1997 I worked as a temp in the North Leeds office responsible for sending out letters to people who’d just been assessed for long-term sickness benefit. And make no mistake, some of the people drawing that benefit (which was a greater sum than they’d get if they were merely unemployed and looking for work), were fraudulent claimants. One of the assessors at that North Leeds office recounted the story of meeting a fraudster, one who had successfully convinced her he was disabled, standing on both feet — obviously mobile — in central Leeds. He was, she gleefully recalled, staring at the advertisements in a travel agent’s shop.
“He’s not going anywhere now,” she chortled as she put together the documents needed to reassess his claim.
So did a careful and responsible government implement an audited but humane system to separate the genuinely incapacitated sheep from the scrounger goats? Of course, they didn’t! The system was horrible. The assessors delivered their brutal judgements based on set criteria and then passed the paperwork on to a room of complacent middle-aged typists who put together the rejection letters from scrawls on those papers using newfangled things called ‘word processors’. Paragraph 1A, paragraph 2C(i). Hard luck, lady, we acknowedge you do, indeed, have a progressive degenerative condition but you have regular bowel movements and can still wipe your own bum.
The surest route to actually getting the benefit was to claim you were depressed. Now, I know depression is real, long-term, and debilitating. But it also responds to talking therapy and other such interventions. (Yes, I am a Johan Hari fangirl and his book Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes Of Depression And The Unexpected Solutions collates scientific evidence from many sources that’s been around for decades.) So were those sufferers (doubtless, many the victims of what GPs refer to as ‘shit life syndrome’) referred to qualified people who could genuinely help and advise them? Of course, they weren’t!
Mental health issues are now estimated to cost the UK economy in the region of £118bn a year, of which long-term benefit is one component.
It was foul, it was crazy, it was very expensive and wasteful, and although I was only there for a few weeks I still feel contaminated by the memory. I moved on to better and more hopeful things, but in 2016 — three governments later — the UK’s sickness benefit system had changed only for the worse. So much so, that Britain’s most internationally respected film-maker made a film about it.
I, Daniel Blake, is that rare thing — a 21st century British drama that treats working class people as the warm, funny, resourceful and mutually supportive beings that they are. The deeply snobbish and dramatically ubiquitous ‘racist Northerner’ character, whose bigotry is deemed by the usual playwriting classes (not just in London but sadly in the North as well) as responsible for Brexit, does not make his or her stock appearance. And for this I can forgive Loach any amount of faults, such as the great lumps of sentimentality that also feature in the work (cue tears in art cinemas from Italy to Japan at the sight of the terminally sick wife, or the fallen madonna).
And what about that random ‘political’ guy towards the end, the speechifying one who has no function in the plot and who behaves like he’s wandered in to find his author from a play by Pirandello? It’s okay. We Brits have already got the message. You’re there to drive the point home for international audiences and help the film win big at European festivals.
Nonetheless, it’s a masterpiece. It’s as much about the agony of a small person trapped in the cogs of a big, hostile, bureaucratic machine as it is about the specifics of the UK social welfare system. It deserves whatever theatrical afterlife we can give it. I, Daniel Blake, adapted for the stage by Dave Johns from the original filmscript by Paul Laverty, makes a brief pitstop at Leeds Playhouse (Oct 3-7, £15-£35) before travelling on to Oxford, Edinburgh, London, Northampton, Coventry and Guildford. Its alleged ‘fictional’ character is enhanced by real-life quotes and tweets from wealthy cabinet ministers.
What’s On Sep 30-Oct 6
This is the week that the Autumn season really gets going, with homegrown productions premiering on several Yorkshire mainstages.
We Could All Be Perfect
Nice girls across the planet are having a really bad time. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who co-wrote The Coddling Of The American Mind, a book about how American campus culture is a breeding ground for mental health issues amongst young people, has turned his attention the influence of social media platforms. His research findings (documented in his excellent Substack After Babel) are bleak: Not only do sex-differentiated styles of social media use mean that girls since 2012 have been impacted more than boys, but within that category it is girls with liberal beliefs who have been most affected.
He writes:
“Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys).
“Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls.
“But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty.”
Wow.
The message Keep Your Young Daughters Away From Smartphones And Social Media!!! should be shouted from the rooftops. But the bigger picture, affecting everybody, is that the internet use encourages disempowering beliefs. An entire generation, with liberal girls at the vanguard, are losing their internal locus of control, and with that the ability to regulate their own painful emotions.
We Could All Be Perfect is a celebration of the girl power we are losing. A series of rapid Tik-Tok-length vignettes amount to a larger whole in Hannah Morley and Ruby Clarke’s optimistic production which suggests that teenage girls have always been at the heart of cultural paradigm shifts and that they may have their own unique ability to find a way through. I don’t share their optimism but I pray God that it’s so. The Playhouse, Sheffield Theatres, Sep 23-Oct 14, £15-£22.
The Hypochondriac
Also at Sheffield Theatres, this time on the bigger Crucible mainstage, is Liverpool poet Roger McGough’s take on Moliere’s classic farce The Hypochondriac.
In 2018, the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford Upon Avon set the award-winning Kumars At No. 42 writing team of Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto the task of relocating Tartuffe, the 17th-century French playwright’s satire on religious grifters, to Birmingham’s Pakistani community. It was such a hit that the show later transferred to Birmingham Rep.
Sheffield Theatres will be hoping to repeat this success with Edward Hogg in the title role as the rich man who spends all his money on doctors he doesn’t need, much to his family’s exasperation. Sep 30-Oct 31, £15-£33
Falstaff
And finally (because my injection arm is still aching) don’t miss Opera North’s production of Verdi’s opera Falstaff, which is based on Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives Of Windsor. Literature’s most loveable rogue finds himself in hot water when he attempts to seduce two wealthy women at once. Unfortunately for him, they compare notes…
Performing at Leeds Grand until Oct 25 (£14.50-£83) then touring to Theatre Royal, Newcastle and Salford Quays.
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Funny, witty and entertaining as usual. Thank you for making me smile. 😁
Great stuff, Liz. And "shit life syndrome" needs to be amplified 200%