Billy Liar - Retrospective " Bradford Yorkshire"

Tragi-comic misadventures of a young man who invents a fantasy world as cover for his troubles and dreary middle-class existence in sixties Yorkshire.
Billy Liar was always a terrific film, but like so many of its kitchen-sink contemporaries (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving) it has actually grown in substance and depth since its release. Part of the reason is the extensive use of on-location filming all these movies utilised: a post-war industrial landscape long since lost and therefore all the more vivid in its posterity. But where Billy Liar gets a bigger march on its predecessors - whether by intent or accident - is that it captures this landscape on the cusp of the swinging sixties, when architecture, culture, leisure and morality were all rapidly changing. In doing so it heralds many of the themes and issues that were to dominate western culture for the remainder of the 20th Century: pop culture, advertising, media obsession, celebrity, race relations and fantasy lifestyles.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Keith
• Waterhouse
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• Schelsinger
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• British
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• Wave

[shonuffido]

Steve what was the name of the documentary that you taped this from. Obviously I missed it. Didnt know it existed until tonight. Thanks for the upload. Great to see the "then and now" clips of your home town : )

[steve01274]

@shonuffido sorry mate i cant remember. all know its was weekly tv series in 2007? on BBC 4 about British kitchen-sink cinema . 

[eyeworks88]

I don't suppose you happen to have the rest of this documentary, do you?

If so, could you put it up

It would be great to be able to see the rest of it.

[steve01274]

@eyeworks88 sorry my friend i dont. as im from Bradford i just tape Billy liar part.

[falconoilcompany]

An absolute classic. Tom Courtney couldnt have been a better choice for this role.Even now years after the event it is so fresh and very funny. Hopefully all kids will laugh at Billy because there is so much of all of us in him.

[eyeworks88]

@steve01274 Being from Wakefield, I wouldn't have minded seeing the 'This Sporting Life' part; or the whole thing in fact.

I don't suppose you know what the program was called do you?

[c0bbl3rs]

Just watched Billy Liar for first time. I grew up in Bradford, seeing those locations was poignant, verging on surreal. Seen as some of those locations are now simply vanished, with the vast Wastefield Westfield abandoned hole in thevground shopping development. The super Market opened by Danny, my mum used to take us there as many others would go to, back in the 1980's when it was shoppers paradise.