Filmhistory.qxp_Layout 1 21/06/2021 16:42 Page 1
FILM
Technicolour time capsule
Years before a single bedpan had been emptied on an episode of Casualty, Bristol set the scene for one of Britain’s earliest teen flicks, capturing a city on the cusp of change. Darryl W. Bullock uncovers Bristol’s most Bristolian movie
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ristol has supplied the backdrop to a staggering number of movies and TV shows over the years, and it’s also recognised as a hotbed for TV and film production, for internationally acclaimed animation and as the home of significant acting, writing and directing talent. Even under Covid the Doctor Who crew managed to make it to Bristol to film scenes for the next series. There’s so much happening here that, in 2017, Bristol was awarded UNESCO City of Film status. The city is rightly famous for supplying the location for everything from Only Fools and Horses and The Young Ones, to more recent successes such as Being Human, Sherlock and A Very British Scandal, but our cinematic and televisual history stretches back long before then. Years before Morph was a twinkle in Aardman Animations’ collective eye, before a single bedpan had been emptied on an episode of Casualty, in 1962 Bristol was used as the backcloth to one of Britain’s earliest teen flicks, Some People.
Bristol is such an integral part of the plot that it really deserves its own credit in the cast list
Made decades before the city became a major player in Britain’s film and TV industry, there has never been a more Bristolian film than Some People. In fact, Bristol is such an integral part of the plot that it really deserves its own credit in the cast list. Opening with an aerial shot of the city that takes in still-recognisable and iconic buildings including City Hall, before racing around the city centre and past Vespa dealer Cruickshank Motors (remember, this was before the Italian scooters would become synonymous with mod culture), Some People captures Bristol on the cusp of change. There’s a shot of a gorgeous neon sign advertising Bristol brand cigarettes on a longdemolished building on Broad Quay – where the Radisson Blu hotel now stands – and we get a brief look through the windows of record stores, TV hire-purchase shops and jewellers. The local atmosphere is completed by images of several green Bristol double decker buses, and dozens of beautiful, early ’60s advertisements. The action starts proper with the leather jacket-wearing, bequiffed bad boy Johnnie leaning on a railing in the old Bristol coach station, before we’re treated to a tour of the docks and a promise of a night up at the water tower, and that’s just the first five minutes. And – hang on a moment – isn’t that Harold Steptoe reading a copy of the Western Daily Press? ‘They were young, bored rebels – living for kicks’, according to the movie’s tagline, but who on earth would have thought that these teenage tearaways would have found what they were looking for in a basement coffee bar on Whiteladies Road, or at a mobile takeaway on Durdham Down? Shot entirely in and around the city, Some People features a number of local actors and musicians alongside such well-known names as Harry H. Corbett, Ray Brooks (who plays our hero, Johnnie, and will be best known to readers of a certain age as the narrator of cult ’70s animated series Mr Benn), David Hemmings and Kenneth More – the star of such box office hits as Reach for the Sky, Doctor in the House and Genevieve. With Some People made to highlight the work of the 46 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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JULY 2021
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Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, More donated his usual fee to the youth charity. Brooks and Hemmings had just finished work on the Billy Fury vehicle Play It Cool, directed by Michael Winner; Some People catches these two rising stars shortly before they landed their defining roles, Brooks in The Knack – And How To Get It, and Hemmings in seminal arthouse movie Blow-Up. Angela Douglas, who plays Terry – the girl all the boys are potty about – was 22 years old when she began an on-set affair with the film’s male lead, the 48-year-old Kenneth More. The couple married in 1968 and were together until More’s death in 1982. She appeared in four Carry On films, including Carry On Cowboy and Carry On Screaming. Anneke Wills, who played Anne, More’s daughter in the movie, would become best known for playing Polly in 36 episodes of Doctor Who. Also of note is Frankie Dymon, the young Black actor who plays drummer Jimmy. Dymon would go on to join political activist group the British Black Panthers, appeared in the Rolling Stones documentary Sympathy For The Devil, and would write and direct the country’s first Black Power film, Death May Be Your Santa Claus. The film takes in a visit to a long-gone basement coffee lounge near the Triangle, the El Toro Espresso Bar on Queen’s Road, plus youth clubs and church halls, the Bristol aircraft factory and Wills’ cigarette works in Bedminster, even a spot of dress shopping in Marks and Spencer in Broadmead – apparently escalators were big news in 1962. There’s a trip to the Old Vic, then still known as the Theatre Royal, to see the play The Sitting Duck, which had its world premiere there on 10 April 1962. The younger members of the Some People cast spent several weeks in Bristol before filming commenced, picking up the local accent and checking out locations. It paid off; there’s an authentic quality to the film that is missing from movies shot entirely in the studio, although Corbett’s West Country accent leaves a lot to be desired! Scenes of the youths riding on their motorbikes along the Portway and beneath Clifton Suspension Bridge, for example, could never have worked if they had been filmed on a studio lot, or on static machines in front of a backdrop. The fact that some of the dialogue was improvised only adds to the realism.
Dymon would join the British Black Panthers, appear in the Rolling Stones documentary Sympathy For The Devil, and write and direct the country’s first Black Power film, Death May Be Your Santa Claus Despite the authentic local feel, Some People is also full of weird continuity errors that most viewers would not notice, but that would make your average Bristolian tear their hair out. Take the scene where Johnnie is sharing his first drink in a pub with his father. The pub in question is The Palace, in Old Market, now sadly closed, but there’s no mistaking the brass, barley sugar twists that still adorn the nowabandoned bar. Johnnie steps outside the pub and walks across the road to The Magnet fish and chip shop which, as we all know, is in
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