http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4301199,00.html
How to make a drama out of a crisis
Ken Loach has never been afraid to experiment. His new film, The
Navigators, is no exception. It has an unlikely subject - the privatisation
of British Rail - and a cast of northern comics and singers
Sheila Johnston
Observer
Sunday November 18, 2001
Have you heard the one about Ken Loach, the stand-up comics and the comedy
about the privatisation of British Rail? Loach's new film, The Navigators,
follows a gang of track- maintenance workers whose easy camaraderie and
humorous banter dissolve into terrible mutual betrayal under the strain of
the new working practices. Many roles are played by comedians and singers
with little previous acting experience who have been drawn from the
northern club circuit. Their brilliant timing and teamwork are fundamental
to Loach's tragi-comedy, but this particular story contains several stings
in its tail.
On a cold night in Sheffield - the setting of the film - earlier this week,
one of Loach's cast, Venn Tracey, has come 'across the border' (his phrase)
from Oldham, Lancashire, with a coachload of mates to catch a cinema
screening of The Navigators before it goes out on television. Also
present is another cast member, Sean Glenn, a dark, intense figure, dapper
and besuited. Both were approached by Loach's researchers because of their
extensive contacts in the showbusiness community. Trying his own luck at
auditions, Tracey admits to anxiety. 'I said to Ken that I was a bit
bothered because I'd never been to drama school or anything, but he told me
that I was acting every night that I went up on stage.'
Glenn is more confident. He's keen to stress that he's an actor of long and
broad experience. He played opposite Laurence Olivier in a television
production of King Lear (1984), as a spear carrier. He was 'a Rover's
Return regular on Coronation Street . One of their best darts players'. He
appeared in Budgie , the Seventies television series starring Adam Faith.
One of his press cuttings praises him as 'probably the finest singer ever
to appear at the Bucknell Ex-Service Men's Club'. The Navigators is his
second film (the first was Stardust in 1974).
Tey talk about Loach's methods. Tracey says: 'He would give us a script in
the evening for the next day. You'd get little notes - "Don't tell Charlie
or Sean about this line". They would have a note - "Don't tell Venn". We
never saw the whole thing and never knew where the film was going.' Playing
his first scene, in which his depot supervisor lectures rail workers on the
impending privatisation, Glenn was discomfited to find his big speech being
ignored or heckled. 'Ken set me up. When I went in, I expected all the guys
to listen, but instead they had been told to barrack me. I hadn't
realised at first that this was a comedy or that I was a fall guy. But Ken
puts you completely at ease and makes you feel happy with him.'
The following morning brings an invitation to a cup of milky tea at Dean
Andrews's neat redbrick house in a neat Rotherham suburban street of
ex-council houses come up in the world. Andrews is a singer. He is joined
by comedian Charlie Brown, a large man with a booming Yorkshire accent and
a contagious, wheezy laugh. The talk turns to Rob Dawber, a former
railwayman who wrote the screenplay, his first, based on his own
experience: he appears briefly in The Navigators as one of the workers at
a derailment. Dawber died last February of cancer, contracted while working
with asbestos on the railways.
'It sounds funny,' Brown says, 'but it were the best funeral I've ever been
to, that.' Shovelling earth on his coffin, one mourner dropped his spade
into the grave, prompting a voice to pipe up from the crowd: 'Try digging
your way out of that one, Rob!' Dawber, they both reckon, would have
enjoyed it.
But the comedy in his script was, above all, a blueprint. 'There were a lot
of adlibs,' Andrews recalls. 'Ken would tell us to say whatever we'd feel.
He never says "action" and he never says "cut".' He cites one scene in
which Brown's character is encouraged by the others to expect a free can of
sardines with his order of fish and chips.
'All the quips and innuendos were added by the actors. We were all like
tennis players batting each other lines, with people thinking of new jokes
all the time. One of the takes must have gone on for 10 minutes, even
though Ken only used about 10 seconds.'
Many scenes never made the final cut - the comics all regret a piece of
lost shtick in which a hated time clock ends up in a canal. 'It would be a
danger to be seduced by a whole set of gags,' comments Loach from the
cutting-room of his next project. 'But you spend weeks editing the footage,
so there's time to get disenchanted with the jokes. And, even if you can't
include a scene in the end, it's quite good to let the men play on. It gets
everyone really excited and confident, and improves their performances.'
In his 1975 play Comedians (currently getting a deserved revival by the
Oxford Stage Company), Trevor Griffiths looked at the political complexion
of stand-up comedy and asked: should it, and can it, challenge established
values? The comics from The Navigators describe their acts as being firmly
in the traditional mould, more Bernard Manning than Ben Elton. Brown, who
has never played a venue further south than Northampton, tells gags about
the wife and kids or holidays to Benidorm. 'Comedy and politics don't mix
in this area,' he says. 'A northern club audience just wouldn't want to know.'
Tracey's routine consists of general musings on everyday life, with riffs
on such themes as blokes who go out on the piss instead of going home to
the missus. 'I'd steer away from wisecracks about Railtrack because people
have died and you never know who's in your audience,' he explains. 'But
doing this film has given me thought. I've written quite a few little bits
since then.'
Could he be right? There's no need to underline The Navigators ' topical
significance, both at the time when it was filmed (the train derailment was
shot two days after the Hatfield crash) and now that it's completed. But is
the loss of jobs and lives a laughing matter? 'The humour of a situation
can co-exist with its dark side,' Loach insists.
'When the last workers are made redundant in the film and are still
expected to clock on and off, the thing is full of ironies and absurdities:
they're not going to get paid for doing nothing, but there is nothing to
do. It is comic, but it's also tragic and stupid.' Even so, he agrees that
these ambiguities of tone might be harder for a comedian to con vey before
a live audience, five pints into Friday night, when the cheery, collective
guffaw counts for more than the rueful smile.
And anyway, the clubs have become a grind, grumble the old troupers. The
houses are half-full, the punters all at home with takeaways from the
off-licence. 'Tastes are changing,' says Glenn. 'Young people don't like
clubs - they think they're old-fashioned and prefer wine bars and discos.'
Brown used to work four or five nights a week. 'Nowadays it's just two.
Sometimes one. And the bingo's the main attraction, not us.'
And the world of movies, even the grungy, low-budget world of a Ken Loach
film, seems to them glamorous and exciting. Some have basked briefly in the
spotlight at international film festivals, where The Navigators has been
playing to great approval. 'You think of that when you're having a shit
time with a particularly bad audience,' Andrews says. 'You've tasted the
honey and you want more. The hardest thing to grasp is that nothing in your
life has changed at all.' But he has been taking private drama lessons and
also found an agent. Brown has been on lots of auditions: for a role as a
janitor - 'Typecast already!' - various television jobs and, curiously,
commercials for sports shoes and All-Bran. 'Nowt has come of it so far.
You've got to keep your feet on t'ground, haven't you? But if you don't
give the ball a kick you're not going to find out. I used to get a lot of
work as an extra, Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm , but since the
film, the casting directors don't want me.'
Where does your career go, after all, after making your debut with a
world-class director? Andrews admits he hadn't heard of Loach before the
film, but was soon put right when a search turned up 1,481 websites on the
internet. 'I didn't realise he was somebody to aspire to,' he says now. 'I
guess everything's downhill from now on.'
Loach has offered them post-partum advice, but he is too pragmatic to
encourage false hopes. 'Acting is a funny business and getting work is not
dependent on whether you're good,' he says. 'But they're very
three-dimensional and they've certainly got the talent. And, if you're
going to start work at 6.30 on a wet morning, you couldn't have a nicer
bunch to turn up with.'
The Navigators Venn Tracey, 59, is from Oldham. He's a comedian who's spent
40 years on the club circuit, performing on average five times a week.
Describes himself as 'greying, with a moustache, a nasty-looking piece of
work'. Plays a staunch Old Left union rep.
Dean Andrews, 38, comes from Rotherham. He's worked for 20 years as a
lounge singer in clubs and on cruise ships and has a little amateur
dramatic experience. Plays one of the core gang of track maintenance
workers, 'the five musketeers'.
Sean Glenn, 56, from Sheffield, is a producer-singer-actor-theatrical
agent. 'Been knocking around since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.' Will
soon star as the wicked Abanazar in his own touring production of Aladdin
. Plays the officious depot supervisor.
Charlie Brown, 53, comes from Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire. He made his
debut aged 10 at a Blackpool talent show. Has plied an act consisting of
'part stand-up, part singing, part magic' ever since. Plays the rail depot
janitor, a foul-mouthed man.
The Navigators will be broadcast on C4 on Sunday 2 December at 10pm
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