‘I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice.’
Many of The Smiths’ most memorable early lyrics were lifted from the work of playwright Shelagh Delaney, and there’s a choice selection of them in this wonderful 1961 adaptation of her debut play, written when she was only 19.
The film has been selected by photographer Nick Hedges, whose revelatory images of housing conditions in the 1960s and 70s are currently on show at the Birmingham Back to Backs. Like Hedges’ own work, the film drew its power from exploring working-class lives that had rarely been depicted onscreen before. Jo for example (played by the effervescent Rita Tushingham), who builds an alliance with gay textiles student Geoffrey (Murray Melvin) after watching the father of her unborn child sail away from Salford Docks.
The film will be preceded by a new short documentary about Nick Hedges filmed by Dan Watts, commissioned to accompany the exhibition Home in the Shadows.
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