Alan Clarke

Diabetic Horace is mentally impaired and works in a joke shop. He befriends loner schoolboy, Gordon Blackett who retreats from his loveless home into an imaginary world.Read More »

Alan Clarke’s 1975 Playhouse drama Diane is a deeply bleak and unsettling account of incest between a father (Frank Mills) and his daughter, the titular character played by that great character actress Janine Duvitski in her TV debut.Read More »

Depiction of the everyday life of a teenage heroin addict.

Christine is a pasty-faced teen in a windbreaker and ill-fitting striped shirt who walks endlessly from one peer-aged client to another during the deserted daytime of the suburbs.Read More »

In a play drawn from his non-fiction book of the same name, David Yallop combines dramatic reconstruction with direct documentary address to detail the miscarriage of justice which led to the hanging of Derek Bentley in 1953.

The tense opening film sequence shows 16-year-old Christopher Craig’s shoot-out with police, during which PC Sidney Miles is shot dead. Craig’s 19-year-old friend Derek Bentley is unarmed and placidly under arrest throughout. In court, however, both are found guilty of murder; Craig is too young to receive the death sentence but Bentley, despite widespread protests, is hanged. Yallop uncovers serious judicial failings, and denies that Bentley incited Craig, or that he ever said the famous phrase “let him have it, Chris”.Read More »

This is the original version made for the BBC but banned by them and never screened until 15 years later. The BBC said that they banned it because “There was too much incident packed into too short a time and that they doubted the veracity.” So they thought it was pure fiction. But they also said that it “looked too much like a documentary.”

A brutal depiction of life in the borstal system where order is maintained through violence and intimidation. Carlin’s journey up the pecking order from new boy to ‘Daddy’ earns him the respect of inmates and officers alike.Read More »

Road, Christine, Contact, and the documentary on Clarke “Alan Clarke directs.” I have these on a single dvd compilation disc, and so am upping them here as a single dvd -r rather than as separate avis. I’m told the versions of these upped already on this site are not great and hopefully these will be better. They deserve to be seen in the best form possible — criminally, they’re not in distribution.Read More »

An extraordinary evocation of conflicting forces within England: authority, tradition, hypocrisy, landscape, art, sexuality, and most of all, its mystical, ancient past. All of this comes together in Stephen, a rather prissy adolescent, and his growing pains deep in Elgar’s Worcestershire. Marrying the very different styles and concerns of writer David Rudkin and director Alan Clarke, Penda’s Fen delves deep into the heart of England to try and find answers to its identity. You’re unlikely to have seen anything quite like this and its strange events will stay with you for years afterwards.Read More »

Quote:
Alan Clarke first released Scum in 1977 as a BBC TV-film, yet the BBC disapproved of the film due to the amount of raw, harrowing realism which had been packed into a short running-time. Therefore the BBC banned the version, and it was not until fifteen years later that the TV-version was aired on the UK’s Channel 4. Though, to get around not being able to release the TV version of Scum Alan Clarke opted in for developing a remade, feature-length version to be aired at cinemas, this was released in 1979. The film sent shockwaves through cinemas across Britain, causing huge controversy from the media, government and British public. Some people saw the film as a “visceral image of a flawed system”, while others saw the film as “exploitive trash in the form of a documentary”.Read More »