BLOOD ON THE DOLE. (1994) DIRECTED BY PIP BROUGHTON. PRODUCED BY ALAN BLEASDALE AND ALAN THOMPSON. STARRING STEPHEN WALTERS, PHILIP DOWD, SUZANNE MADDOCK, RACHEL CALDWELL AND ANEIRIN HUGHES.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'You're no-one without a job.'
'A gritty social drama of disenfranchised youth and teenage love.'
Ah now, this is good old-fashioned British drama at its finest, produced by screenwriter Alan Bleasdale who is best known for the social realism of his output. The regular, shitty everyday lives of ordinary people, in other words.
If you're looking for sheer fantastical, other-worldly escapism, stick with your GAME OF THRONES box-set but, if you like your escapism to come with a good healthy dollop of 'other peoples' problems,' which I do myself, then you'll love BLOOD ON THE DOLE.
Joey and Ricky are two Scouser school-leavers living in a deprived area of Merseyside. People for whom English is not their first language may need an interpreter for their marvellously thick Scouser accents, so keep that in mind. They're two lively scallywags, not above getting into mischief but mostly they're two lovely (if troubled, especially Joey) lads just looking for a break.
Cathy and Jean are two school-leavers from the same alma mater as the two lads. The two lads are head-over-heels in love with the two lasses but they never do anything about it. Except talk endlessly about it amongst themselves, lol. You snooze, you lose. The lads snooze and so, before very much time has elapsed, the girls, unaware of their would-be suitors' intentions, have found themselves other beaux.
Red-haired Jean gets engaged to a lad her own age and Cathy, immediately on leaving school, embarks on an affair with their former P.E. teacher, David Williams. He's a much older man, Welsh, with a zippy little red sports car in which he ferries the infatuated Cathy here, there and everywhere. He seems exciting to Cathy at first, but in reality he's a stuffy, boring pompous arse who lectures Cathy endlessly- and patronisingly- about her future prospects.
If it had been me writing this script, I'd have had him taking her virginity, knocking her up and then leaving her, telling her in a sad voice that it could never have worked, they're just too different and here's a few quid towards a termination. As it is, I was somewhat outraged that we didn't get an invite to snoop into their sex life at all. How very dare they, those meanie script-writers...? Clearly uptight and repressed, that's their problem, lol.
As it is, we see Cathy gradually realising for herself that David's world is very different to her own. By hanging around with David and his elderly relatives, she's depriving herself of the chance to be a young person, the chance to have fun and make mistakes and have a dozen different boyfriends on the go at once if she feels like it.
The focus of the story, in any case, is on Joey and Ricky, two friends for life who just can't seem to find work that pays enough and suits them. We see them trying various rubbish jobs, from being carnival ride operators to humping bags of mail around for the Post Office, each successive 'failure' only serving to depress them further and convince them that 'there's nothing down for us.'
Ricky is a lovely, funny, kind of goofy-looking young fella who plays the role of sidekick to Joey's leader. He gets very emotional at times, like when he's humming the theme tune to the Hovis Bread advert to a party of stoners on New Year's Eve. Well, that's emotive enough to make a rock burst into tears, lol. Brings back happy memories too of Channel 4's list shows, the top 100 adverts of all time and that type of thing.
Ricky's happy to go along with everything Joey says and he's a staunchly loyal friend who puts up with Joey's weird mood swings and occasional baffling speeches, to which Joey is prone. Not many people could successfully make friends- and stay friends- with the prickly Joey.
Joey is a complex character. I was discussing the character with a friend who's convinced that there's a little bit of autism in there, in Joey. He's obviously highly, fiercely intelligent, with a fantastic memory for quotes and figures and a talent for art that could turn into a career, but his social skills verge on the catastrophic side. He always comes across as an angry guy with a big fat chip on his shoulder.
He loathes David Williams, his former P.E. teacher, and he hates him even more when he finds out that his beloved Cathy has been dating him. David's a total sleazebag. Can he not get- and keep- a woman his own age, without mooching about in the bloody kindergarten for a girlfriend? We certainly feel Joey's pain when he finds out for the first time about Cathy and drippy David.
So, do things pan out for the tormented Joey, the happy-go-lucky Ricky, the thoughtful and sensitive Cathy and the fun-loving Jean? What chance do they have, living in a so-called 'deprived area' during a flippin' recession when 'I'm sorry, that job's already gone' is the refrain they hear most often down the Jobcentre? It's enough to depress anyone, is that.
Paul Price is a terrific character, by the way. In that he serves as an 'awful warning' to Joey and Ricky as to how they don't want to end up in life, haha. A stoner, albeit a 'cool' one who sports a leather jacket and an earring and has a knocked-up teenage girlfriend, one of their own school chums.
Paul's unemployed, he hangs around with school-leavers for company and he will never get anywhere in life, as long as he keeps smoking- and dealing- weed. To end up like Paul Price would be a tragic waste of their potential and, to their credit, the lads do seem to realise this.
I would have loved to have seen something of the home lives or the backgrounds of the four main characters. We're not really invited into their homes, however, and we don't get to meet their parents. Again, if it was me writing the script, I'd have given Joey an unemployed alcoholic father who beat the shit out of him and therefore given us a reason for Joey's 'hurt-them-before-they-hurt-you attitude.
I'd have given Cathy a Mum or Dad who waited up for her to come home from dates with David and screamed at her to get her head out of the clouds and start dating someone her own age. A parent who demanded to know of David what kind of a pervert was he, dating- and probably deflowering as well- a girl, a child half his age? David gets away with murder in this film because Cathy's parents aren't in the picture, at least for the viewer.
Ah well. I didn't actually write the script, lol. I'm just going here by my own instincts, which tell me that a fuller, more rounded glimpse of the characters' backgrounds might have helped in this instance. It's still a great film, though, gritty and realistic and funny and sad at the same time. You'll love it. Now, a nice thick buttery slice of Hovis, anyone...?
All four films from Channel 4's ALAN BLEASDALE PRESENTS series are being released on DVD for the very first time: BLOOD ON THE DOLE, PLEASURE, REQUIEM APACHE and SELF-CATERING.
On the back of his success with landmark dramas BOYS FROM THE BLACK STUFF, GBH and THE MONOCLED MUTINEER, in 1994 Channel 4 gave BAFTA winner Alan Bleasdale carte blanche to find and mentor new up-and-coming TV writers.
This resulted in four films being created for the ALAN BLEASDALE PRESENTS series, produced by Alan Bleasdale and featuring new faces that have gone on to become some of Britain's most popular actors.
BLOOD ON THE DOLE, PLEASURE, REQUIEM APACHE and SELF-CATERING are all out now, courtesy of SIMPLY MEDIA.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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