Overshadowed by ‘The Full Monty’ and immortalised by Chumbawumba: the strange story of ‘Brassed Off’
Through no fault of its own, the worst thing that happened to Brassed Off was The Full Monty. On the surface, the two British favourites don’t have an awful lot in common, but there were enough superficial and spiritual similarities to ensure the latter almost swallowed the former whole.
The Full Monty became a certified sensation that conspired to clear a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office, and it won an Academy Award for its score in addition to landing three more nominations for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
Brassed Off, meanwhile, only cost a few hundred thousand pounds less to produce and barely recouped those figures from cinemas. It was the recipient of enthusiastic reviews, too, but it didn’t make a dent in either the cultural conversation or the awards season circuit.
Both movies told working-class Yorkshire stories deeply rooted in the economic hardships of the time and used niche pastimes as a way to explore their themes. In The Full Monty, it was Robert Carlyle’s Gaz being laid off from his factory job and creating a striptease act to try and generate the additional income he and the rest of his woefully ill-equipped dancers need to make ends meet.
For Brassed Off, Pete Postlethwaite’s Danny Ormondroyd struggles to keep the spirits of his brass band players up when the looming shadow of a potential coal mine closure threatens to ravage the landscape, undo generations of community, and create widespread job losses and misery among the population.
Obviously, male strippers and brass bands aren’t two peas in a pod apart from the fact they require plenty of oil and grease to achieve the best results, but Brassed Off had already been forgotten by the time The Full Monty released eight months later. They’re both great films with a uniquely British flavour that deserved to find a wide audience, but it wasn’t a fate both pictures were allowed to embrace.
On the plus side, Brassed Off did gain an unexpected second life when Postlethwaite’s grandstanding monologue was sampled by Chumbawumba on the band’s signature single, ‘Tubthumping’. Ironically, the track reached number two in the United Kingdom charts and hit the summit in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand, as well as cracking the top ten in the United States, which gave Brassed Off its widest audience yet without most people even realising.
The movie’s enduring appeal gave rise to a stage production that premiered in early 1998 and toured the country, and it was revived once again in 2014 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike, so it did at least get to enjoy some degree of longevity.
Then again, ask 100 people to name a British film released between 1996 and 1997 that tackled very real socio-political, economic, and financial concerns through the bespoke lens of a dramedy, and at least 99 of them are going to answer with The Full Monty, which is a disservice to the many merits of Brassed Off.
