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On Greece preparing for the Olympicss: "Watching the Greeks make even more of a dog's breakfast of it than we would comes as a tonic for the nation." Later whilst scouring the film catalogue at film school I discovered the classic 1963 film directed by John Schlesinger and starring Tom Courtenay as Billy Fisher. A film which took the grim up north stereotypes that had become the norm in British New Wave cinema and turned them on their head with comedy and the careful use of surrealism.
The music video for the song " The Importance of Being Idle" by Oasis contains scenes based on scenes from Billy Liar, although most of it is based on the video for the Kinks' Dead End Street. Soon after, he was appointed the Pennines walking correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post, where he is still remembered for his "flaming red unruly hair rising up from his head".Keith Waterhouse, who has died aged 80, always described himself as a lazy man, even though he produced a body of work that reduced his Fleet Street rivals to envious dismay. Apart from the novels, plays, film scripts, sitcoms and magazine articles that flowed unceasingly from his vintage Adler typewriter (he hated new technology), he also wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column, beginning in the Daily Mirror in 1970, and from 1988 for the Daily Mail, until the paper announced his retirement last May. Billy Liar tells the story of Billy Fisher, a dreamer living in the claustrophobic Yorkshire town in his parents’ house. Billy has dreams, he desperately wants to be a comedy writer and move to London. He doesn’t quite have the courage to go through with it though. As a newsman, he was a correspondent in America, the Soviet Union and Cyprus. And through Labour's links with the Mirror, he often drafted articles and speeches for party leaders Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.
When I first saw the film in 1961 I was also intrigued by the glimpse it offered of a strange new world - the North of England! He chose the Mail, over the pleas of every other national editor, when he left the Daily Mirror in 1986 after 35 years when the late Robert Maxwell took over. The film belongs to the British New Wave, inspired by both the earlier kitchen sink realism movement and the French New Wave. Characteristic of the style is a documentary/ cinéma vérité feel and the use of real locations (in this case, many in the city of Bradford in Yorkshire [5]). His work for the theatre was equally successful, notably Mr and Mrs Nobody and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell - based on his former drinking colleague's weekly columns in the Spectator - which opened in London with Peter O'Toole in 1989. Keith Spencer Waterhouse CBE (6 February 1929 – 4 September 2009 [1]) was a British novelist and newspaper columnist and the writer of many television series.The cross media adaptations did start not or end there though, Keith Waterhouse originally adapted it in to a stageplay which starred a young Albert Finney (who turned down the lead in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia to play Billy!), his success in the movie adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning helping to making Billy Liar an overnight hit in the West End. In February 2004, he was voted Britain's most admired contemporary columnist by the British Journalism Review.