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This chapter focuses on a period of extremely fruitful aesthetic production for Hines, in terms of the novels and screenplays that followed A Kestrel for a Knave. During the 1970s, Hines’s political energies were directed towards considering the institutions and structures of life at a time of active struggle for workers’ rights. Thus industrial action is evident in his novel First Signs (1972), and the pair of Plays for Today The Price of Coal (1977) looks back at the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s even as it anticipates the catastrophic strike of 1984-5. 1973’s Play for Today Speech Day is an experimental play about the class-related implications of education and the dim prospects for school-leavers, his novel The Gamekeeper (1975) about class injustice in relation to private land-ownership. Tom Kite is an unproduced screenplay about the potential offered by football for a working-class man to escape his origins.

This chapter examines social (or documentary) realism in feature film. It focuses on three of Ken Loach's films: Ladybird Ladybird (1994), made before his collaboration with screenwriter, Paul Laverty, and two after: Sweet Sixteen (2002) and It's a Free World... (2006). The reality uncovered in Ladybird Ladybird is arguably not strictly political in a primary, economically driven sense. It is based on the true story of Maggie (Crissy Rock) whose children are taken away by social services. The 'truth' premise that is a given in such an uncompromising work of social realism made for a stark confrontation: on one side, Loach protesting the truth of his depiction; on the other, social services crying foul on behalf of every beleaguered social worker in the country. It might be argued that the resulting standoff over who had truth on their side was not all that productive in improving social services in Britain. Meanwhile, Loach's Sweet Sixteen is a classic example of his later documentary-drama approach. It's a Free World... works to a very similar template as Sweet Sixteen. The chapter then considers realism in Paul Greengrass's drama-documentary Bloody Sunday (2002) and Jim Sheridan's In The Name Of The Father (1993).

This chapter seeks to locate Shane Meadows work within broader traditions of British social realism. With references to the British documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, the British New Wave cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the work of prominent realist directors such as Ken Loach, Meadows' films are explored in light of their similarities to and departures from established trends in British cinema. The chapter makes the case that Meadows and his contemporaries such as Andrea Arnold, Duane Hopkins, Pawel Pawlikowski, Samantha Morton and Joanna Hogg can be seen to move towards a more poetic form of realism that rejects didacticism and explicit explorations of social issues, in favour of a more ambiguous image-led narration. Contemporary British realism is characterised by a focus on young, marginalised protagonists searching for meaning in poetically charged urban and suburban environments. As such, the representation of landscape, space and place is a persistent source of interest within the films. Works from across Meadows' oeuvre are explored in relation to these areas, drawing parallels with the aesthetic and thematic emphases adopted by his contemporaries.

This chapter focusses on Meadows' television work, more specifically his television continuations of the film This is England with the Channel Four series This is England '86 and This is England '88. It discusses the series as both ‘event television’ and youth drama, their relationship with contemporaneous television dramas such as Shameless and Skins as well as the earlier work of television directors including Alan Clarke and Ken Loach. The chapter also foregrounds the importance of memory, not only personal but also historical and televisual, to the This is England corpus.