I came in late the other night and flicking through the channels spotted Meantime on Talking Pictures. It’s an early funny-sad Mike Leigh film (1983) charting the lives of a working class family scraping their way through life. It’s a terrific film, most notable for a number of landmark breakout performances.
Tim Roth as dim-witted sibling Colin delivers the key performance, while doing little more than slouch on the East London council house couch. Phil Daniels, already pretty well known after Quadrophenia, plays his more together brother Mark.
At one point Colin lands a job with an upwardly mobile branch of his family and heads out to Essex to meet them. We memorably see him mooching around at the foot of a large statue of Winston Churchill. This is a scene that always niggles me. I know the area well from my schooldays and it’s a heck of a walk from the statue in Woodford (where Winston was MP) to Colin’s destination in Chigwell. I guess that’s dramatic license from Leigh.
Roth’s Colin is also notable as in his specs and shabby clothes he looks like a dead ringer for a young Graham Coxon from Blur. This is probably not a coincidence. Damon Albarn said in an interview in 2014: “We watched together “Meantime” by Mike Leigh…. This is the story of two brothers who are linked forever. It was projected to our relationship and our story. We wanted to experience the same thing with music."
But the film is also notable for featuring future superstar Gary Oldman in one of his first screen roles. Oldman plays a local deadbeat skinhead, Coxy, whose idea of a good time is sitting in a concrete tube and bashing away at it with a hammer. If the film helped to make Roth’s name it also kick-started Oldman’s glittering career.
And of course after years in Hollywood where he has been one of cinema’s biggest earners Oldman is back in Britain as down-at-heel spy Jackson Lamb in Apple’s Slow Horses. It’s a great performance. As with anything Oldman does you can’t take your eyes off him. He is on award-winning form as the boozy (“house red please, just pour it”) investigator who looks like he has a permanent hangover. Though I do wish he’d wash his hair.
Watching Meantime, however, sent me down one of those Google rabbit holes and I came out with another lost Oldman gem. Honest, Decent And True is a satirical BBC film made in 1986 about the advertising industry directed by one of Leigh’s contemporaries, Les Blair. It stars Ade Edmondson as jaded but talented adman Alun working on a campaign to promote a new beer.
By comparison with the other stars Edmondson, well established after The Young Ones, seems like a veritable veteran. The one-off film also features an extremely young pre-Fast Show Arabella Weir and Richard E Grant. It’s Grant who steals the most scenes as a Japan-obsessed staffer who think using a wok is the height of sophistication. But then maybe it was in 1986. He also plays the flute naked if that’s your thing and looks a bit like Gok Wan.
Oh, and just to bring things full circle, Gary Oldman pitches up as aspiring artist Derek trying to support himself with a menial kitchen job. Needless to say he is brilliant. And also sexy in a way Jackson Lamb maybe once was before alcohol and pies got the better of him. You can watch Honest, Decent And True here.
Meantime is available on DVD. Buy it here. Slow Horses is streaming on Apple TV.