Sunday 12 January 1975: BBC1’s Film of the Week, broadcast this evening at 20.15, was 1963’s Billy Liar, John Schlesinger’s highly regarded adaptation of Keith Waterhouse’s comic novel of 1959. Prime time scheduling of vintage black and white material like this was not unknown, but by 1975 had become the exception rather than the rule – so the BBC must have thought very highly of this British New Wave classic. Making its TV debut back in 1971, Billy Liar was first scheduled on BBC2 in the kind of late evening slot usually reserved for ‘art’ movies and revered foreign language subjects. What had happened to bring about its elevation to its first broadcast on BBC1?
For answer, we need to turn over to commercial television. A sitcom based on Waterhouse’s Billy Liar characters (and scripted by himself in collaboration with Willis Hall) had aired on ITV over two seasons in the autumn of 1973 and 74, and the character would have been readily familiar to an audience less well acquainted with the source novel, film or stage play. Perhaps this was what prompted the BBC to schedule the 1963 movie as its prime Sunday evening feature?
I’d enjoyed LWT’s Billy Liar series, without realising that the character already had three previous lives – novel, theatrical production and movie. I was very familiar with the characters in their TV incarnations: Jeff Rawle, a newcomer to television, played Billy, ably backed up by George A. Cooper as his irate, blustering father, May Warden as his dotty Gran, and Colin Jeavons as the memorably oleaginous Mr. Shadrack. Now I had to reimagine the entire cast and I wasn’t sure at first whether I cared for them as much as their LWT counterparts. One or two of them were unfamiliar to me. I don’t believe I’d ever seen Tom Courtenay in anything before, but his Billy soon erased all memory of Jeff Rawle. The role of Shadrack was taken in the movie by Leonard Rossiter, who in 1975 was on the cusp of becoming a household name but as yet unknown to me. Shadrack was sharply portrayed in the original novel as a snide and supercilious character with a mannered way of speaking. On TV, Colin Jeavons had totally nailed his unctuous persona and I wasn’t quite ready to accept Leonard Rossiter in his stead, pencil moustache and all...
One cast member I was more than familiar with – Rodney Bewes in the role of Billy’s workmate Arthur Crabtree. Bewes gave a performance that he would effectively replicate a year later as Likely Lad Bob Ferris, and I enjoyed his contributions to the movie. Cast wise, the movie’s greatest asset that set it apart from the TV series was Julie Christie: and whilst her movie version of Billy’s nomadic girlfriend Liz wasn’t quite as down at heel as she’s portrayed in print, she was instantly memorable. By the end of the film, I’d decided that this was the kind of girlfriend I needed in my own life.
On the strength of that one viewing, Billy Liar, the movie, became an instant favourite – so much so that when, years later, I had the opportunity of watching the old LWT sitcom again, I couldn’t accept it. Tom Courtenay had become the Billy Fisher of my imagination, and no one else would do… least of all Albert Finney, who had played him in the original West End production.
Setting aside the characters and plot, Billy Liar spoke to me in another dimension – its depiction of the contemporary urban environment circa 1963. Realism was key to the British New Wave, and for the film makers of the era this meant seeking out gritty, northern locales. In Waterhouse’s source novel, Billy Fisher lives in a fictitious north country town called Stradhoughton – but made-up placenames didn’t sit well with the new drive for realism, and the town is unnamed in the movie (similarly, Stan Barstow’s fictional Cressley was not namechecked in the 1961 film of his novel A Kind of Loving).
Only twelve years in the past, Billy Liar was already beginning to look like an artfact from another world. Demolition and redevelopment is a theme that the movie touches on in several key scenes: location work shot around Manchester shows the modernist high rise developments going up along Piccadilly, while older Victorian architecture falls victim to the wrecking ball. The entire opening sequence provides a fascinating drive through various suburban landscapes, culminating in a scene of elderly houses in process of being demolished. Later on, encountering the formidable figure of Councillor Duxbury during a walk over the moors, Billy puts on an act of comical fake nostalgia for the old man, who is bemoaning the loss of the town’s old buildings.
This is interesting because, by the time I got to see the film, this work of post war urban renewal was largely completed. Few town centres were without their own take on brutalist modernity in the form of shopping arcades and civic centres, and high-rise estates had mushroomed where back-to-back houses once stood. We see the same nostalgia for the lost urban landscape in the early episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, and its feature film spin-off (which manages to look like the last gasp of the British New Wave). So much had changed in such a short space of time – in 1975, couples no longer went dancing to live music at Mecca and Roxy ballrooms, and nothing dates the movie so much as its depictions of the twist dance craze and coffee bar culture. By the 70s, this all seemed extraordinarily nostalgic, as did the fashions, furnishings and indeed the movie’s entire milieu. Look back twelve years from 2025 and we find ourselves in 2013, with little evidence of anything having changed – certainly not to the same extent that I saw back in 1975.
One aspect of the movie that sets Billy Liar well apart from other entries in the British New Wave is its emphasis on humour. No other film from the era is so rich in comic scenes and performances – indeed, the genre tended towards a dour pessimism, with unwanted pregnancies featuring in just about every plotline. Billy’s dilemma is more personal and existential, and it was one with I could (and still do) empathise – his desire is to escape from the dull routine of his suburban existence, and he achieves it via his fantasy life, memorably brought to life on screen. When reality offers him a real chance to set himself free, he fails to act on it, preferring the safety of his own fantasy world where he can be dictator, MP, famous author and military hero without the risk of failure.
I knew this film was different because it left a palpable atmosphere in its wake when it ended. I saw it again in October 1977, on what would prove to be its last BBC1 broadcast, and within a year or so, had read Keith Waterhouse’s original novel.
Over the years, the movie came and went across the TV networks, spending a few years in the custody of Channel 4 before returning to BBC2 in the early 90s. I seldom passed up on a chance of watching it, and by the mid 80s had managed to commit it to VHS tape.
Shot in 2.35:1 CinemaScope, the film adapted remarkably well to the pan-and-scan technique employed by broadcasters in the era before television sets could accept widescreen. By 1993, the BBC had adopted a kind of half-way to widescreen compromise, with black bars top and bottom of the picture, but it wouldn’t be until the DVD release of the early 2000s that I finally got to see the film the way its director intended: suddenly, the moorside landscape where Billy gets rid of his Shadrack and Duxbury calendars was opened right out – where once we saw only overhead wires, there was now a whole pylon on view. An overhead shot that has Billy in a toilet cubicle attempting to flush those selfsame calendars to oblivion could now be seen in its original artful intent, with Billy and Shadrack facing off on either side of a locked door.
Fifty years on, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Billy Liar. I know whole swathes of the dialogue verbatim, and yet I could still go on watching. During the late 1980s, I searched fruitlessly for some of the locations, believing the film to have been shot in Manchester – I was part right: there are a few street scenes in the city, including a barely recognisable Old Trafford – but the bulk of the filming took place in Bradford and Leeds. A BBC documentary, Hollywood UK, revisited some key locations in the 1990s, including the Fisher family home, located on Hinchcliffe Avenue, Baildon, Shipley. Seen today on Street View, the house still has its original leaded front windows and side bay which can be seen clearly on screen. I tracked it down many years ago, but was alarmed to realise that the inhabitant was a neurotic who was paranoid about visits from film fanatics. The house has been sold twice since then – perhaps unsurprisingly – and for a Billy Liar fan could have been had for the ‘bargain’ price of £150,000 back in 2019. Perhaps its status as a place of fan pilgrimage keeps the price down – or maybe it's because Baildon is, frankly, horrible...
Billy Liar is a fantasist who aspires to be a writer but exists in a dream world of his own devising. Had I been more self aware in 1975, I might have recognised some of myself in him – at age thirteen, I had already created my own alternate reality, populated with fantasy characters, and had ambitions to someday become a writer. It doesn’t end there, either – Billy Liar is a songwriter, like myself. In fact the only ways in which I don’t resemble William Fisher are his infidelities, his lies, and his fractious family life. Looking back, it’s tempting to see that 1975 broadcast as a warning – you have to take risks, like getting on a train to London, if you want to be in with a chance of realising your ambitions. Or, you can simply stay at home and do it all in your imagination... as Councillor Duxbury says, 'think on!'
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