How a week in Blackpool changed Ken Loach’s life forever
Ken Loach’s films frequently examine socialist ideals, the rights of labour workers and the effects of poverty and homelessness. Loach is a true British film icon, and his 2006 picture, I, Daniel Blake, scooped the Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Unsurprisingly then, Loach himself is from working-class roots. He was born in the Midlands to a mining father and a hairdressing mother. “It was a very normal suburban semi-detached house in Nuneaton,” Loach recently told BBC’s This Cultural Life. However, given the director’s eventual career, it may come as a shock to learn that he was not initially interested in cinema in the slightest, but rather the stage.
“There were cinemas, but we didn’t go as a family,” Loach added. “I was never very interested in the cinema, I was more interested in the theatre. I got stagestruck very early on. [The cinema] just didn’t attract me. I cared passionately about the theatre, having been in the school play The Tempest aged 11. I just got the bug.”
Loach also claimed that a week that he spent in Blackpool as a child was one of the most influential experiences of his life. He spent the week seeing variety shows on the iconic pier of the Lancashire seaside town. Loach said, “We went for a week in Blackpool, and Blackpool was at its height, this is the late 1940s. We might have even gone during the way, I can’t remember.”
Blackpool, at the time, was the epicentre of entertainment in Northern England, and Loach remembers seeing “the great comics of the time”, such as Ethel Revnell and Gracie West. “It was a great experience, he added. “It was the highlight of the year. My mother said, ‘When we get to Blackpool, we’ll stay in the Northern end’, as it was slightly more respectable than the Southern end where the Pleasure Beach was.”
Loach’s favourite of the comics in Blackpool was Frank Randall, born himself in the town. “He was a little fellow, a wiry little fellow,” Loach said. “He had two or three characters. It wasn’t stand-up; it was sketches. It was about bodily functions, his humour. And he’d be a vulgar old man and take his teeth out. It was risqué for the time, but by today’s standards, he was very tame. But he was a great comic.”
Evidently, the experience of seeing Randall would play a profound impact on Loach’s life. He admired Randall’s ability to generate laughter in the face of poverty. “A lot of the comedy was about being hard-up, about not having much, you know,” Loach claimed. “Don’t take the curtains down, we haven’t read them yet, even the mice have got overalls. Just the comedy of a life that is harsh.”
My father would be weeping with laughter, and my mother too,” Loach continued. “For a kid, it was just overwhelming. Just the joy of it, and I think that does stay with you. I work with comics a lot, and I think it stems from that, just, enjoyment of seeing a full house rock with laughter.”
