It is one of the prime minister’s all-time favourite films and has endured in the hearts of the British public since it was released in 1996. Ostensibly a story about a small town colliery band’s journey to the finals of Britain’s biggest brass band competition at the Royal Albert Hall, Brassed Off is unashamedly political.
“I think the people who went expecting a political film got the bonus of a bit of a comedy,” says its writer, Mark Herman, three decades on. “And the people who went expecting comedy got the bonus of the political message. I think anybody who went got a sort of bonus they might not have expected.
“On the face of it, a brass band film is not an easy pitch but word of mouth really rolled and suddenly it went on and on in places for months,” he recalls. “I thought it might be popular within a 10 mile radius of Barnsley for about two weeks,” laughs Herman. “So yeah, it’s amazing.”
Set in the fictional industrial South Yorkshire town of Grimley a decade after mineworkers brought themselves to destitution trying to save their livelihoods, it captures the hopelessness felt by former miners who struggled to keep themselves out of the dole queue during the slow and painful destruction of the mining industry by the Tory government.
Starring Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor, it follows the Grimley Colliery Band as they await a judgment from British Coal as to whether their pit will be closed. A resounding success, Brassed Off went on to be number 85 in the BFI’s list of Top 100 British Films and spawned a popular stage play. To add to the plaudits, Andy Burnham recently named it as one of his four favourite films.
“How do I feel about that? It’s good!” says Herman. “It’s very flattering, but I’d have been more surprised if he’d have chosen Notting Hill.”
On its 30th anniversary, fiction and real life are set to collide when Grimethorpe Colliery Band – the group that inspired the film – heads to the real-life Royal Albert Hall to perform the music alongside a special screening.
The film’s success at the time was “surprising and very rewarding” but the enduring appeal, Herman believes, is because, “It’s not about a brass band in Grimley, it’s about the universal subject of being downtrodden.
“It’s really interesting hearing teens and 20-year-olds talking about the film, because it’s such an old film for them, but it really hits them. They get the message everybody got 30 years ago, because it’s still relevant and still plays.” But these films are a dying breed and Herman admits he is “fairly pessimistic” about the current state of the British film industry. “I feel like films like Brassed Off wouldn’t be made [now].”
“I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to get films similar to Brassed Off off the ground but can’t,” he says. “It seems to be blockbusters or micro-budget at the moment and there’s no space for mid-budget British films like those, films like I want to make.
“The studios are not as brave as they were,” he adds. “They’d stick their neck out, in what I call the old days. It was quite a risky film to make, Brassed Off, but now they seem to only want to put money behind dead certs.”
His favourite films of the last year were I Swear, the biography of a man with severe Tourette syndrome, and The Ballad of Wallis Island, an offbeat comedy drama written by and starring the comedians Tim Key and Tom Basden.
His path – from childhood in the East Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington, to studying graphic design at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) and the National Film and Television School – would still open doors for youngsters in the industry, he thinks. But it is not an easy industry to break into, and now, in his early 70s, he thinks the advice he got when he was young – advice he took for a short while – to move to London, probably still stands.
“If I’d have [stayed in] London and networked I’d have probably done more films, but maybe not ones I care about as much,” he says.
Instead he wrote a powerful script, unashamed to spell out in no uncertain terms how the Conservative government destroyed communities and ruined lives, the effects of which continue. Higher mortality rates from suicide, alcohol and drugs developed – and persist to this day – in former pit towns and the shadow of Margaret Thatcher still lingers like an oil stain in these communities.
In a climactic scene in the Royal Albert Hall, Postlethwaite’s character, Danny, the band’s conductor, gives a memorable speech – later immortalised in the protest song Tubthumping by Chumbawamba – shouting: “I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how people matter.”
During filming, Birmingham town hall was substituted for the London venue, which was too expensive and “didn’t look anything like the Albert Hall”, Herman jokes.
Brassed Off Live will be a “strange experience … when our fake Albert Hall is on screen and you’re sitting in the Albert Hall. It’s a thrill. Thirty years ago would we ever imagine being in the Albert Hall still watching it? It’s amazing.”
• Brassed Off Live is at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on Friday 2 October
