Serious Charge (also known as, amongst other things, A Touch of Hell) is a 1959 feature from director Terence Young that was shot in the new town of Stevenage, doubling as the fictional town of Bellington. The plot sees the residents of the town welcome its new vicar (Anthony Quayle) with open arms until a young delinquent (Andrew Ray, the little boy from The Yellow Balloon all grown up) spreads malicious gossip that turns everyone against him.
Serious Charge is perhaps best known for being the film that provided Cliff Richard with his cinematic debut. Britain's answer to Elvis Presley (as he was then known) takes a minor role as the kid brother of Ray's character, who is saved from a life of crime by Quayle's vicar, and gets to sing snatches of three numbers, including his future number 1 hit, Living Doll. Overall however, he's pretty superfluous to the film and simply serves to add teddy boy colour to the coffee bar scenes which also feature an uncredited Jess Conrad and Philip Lowrie, who would go on to play Dennis Tanner in Coronation Street the following year.
The real meat of the film lies in the vendetta the dangerous and vindictive Ray has against Quayle. When the latter discovers that the boy had impregnated a young girl who later dies, he tries to get him to face the consequences and atone for his behaviour, however Ray pulls a cruel trick that sees him claim the vicar has tried to 'interfere' with him - a timely frame-up that relies on the staged aftermath being witnessed by Sarah Churchill's character Hester, who has previously had her romantic overtures towards Quayle gently rejected. As the old adage has it, 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', and pretty soon the whole town is believing the established Hester's word against the previously popular new clergyman.
A film from several decades ago handling what is such a topical theme in today's terms is one that automatically makes you sit up and pay attention, but unfortunately Serious Charge takes a long time to actually get there and the first forty minutes are something of a chore, being a mix of polite drawing room conversation between the older members of the cast and painfully dated sequences featuring the 'hip' teenagers accompanied by Cliff's singing. When the plot does kick in though, the film delivers something that is quite watchable as Quayle's dignified man of the cloth has to turn the other cheek amidst the evil gossip surrounding him.
If I hadn't known this film was shot in Stevenage I doubt I'd have been able to guess, as the vast majority of the action takes place in the old town, giving the film much more of a village feel than a new town feel, despite the occasional reference to new towns and the growing urban patch that the church must attempt to reach within the script. Even the town's high street, which features heavily, is barely recognisable given the passage of time. It's a world away from the town as depicted in Boston Kickout some thirty five years later, which is more in keeping with my own experience of the place.
You can watch it here
"There's loads to do in Stevenage...if you like concrete"
"I fucking hate this town"
Stevenage. No offence to anyone who hails from there, but it really is a shithole. I can just about say this, as I used to go out with a girl from there and visited its grim concrete desolation row regularly. It's telling that the two most famous films made in Stevenage, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and this, chart the decline from optimism to pessimism of these government sponsored urban landscapes that were built upon the rural and undeveloped areas of our land in the postwar period to help accommodate the 'overspill' from deprived inner city areas. In the earlier film the mood is bright and breezy for our young freewheeling protagonists, but by the time we reach the 1990s of Boston Kickout, the youth on display are emphatically disillusioned. The film, from writer/director Paul Hills, is a semi-autobiographical tale about his own experiences growing up in the town.
Phil (John Simm) moved from London to Stevenage as a child with his father (Derek Martin) in the 1980s shortly after witnessing his mother's suicide. Now it is 1991 and Phil and his friends, Ted (Andrew Lincoln), Matt (Nathan Valente) and Steve (Richard Hanson), have just left school and are caught in that limbo period of the 'final' summer; waiting for the exam results that will shape their adult lives. Ted, effortlessly cool, is keen to break out of the stifling atmosphere of his hometown and promptly disappears in dramatic fashion on that first night of freedom - perhaps because he knows that if you stick around any longer you'll end up like Steve's older brother, Robert (a scene-stealing Marc Warren), a wild skinhead who revels in his small town legend; "I've been thrown out of every club in Stevenage!" he gleefully proclaims after the bouncers chuck him into the street for glassing someone. "There's only two!" Phil points out, but it does little to deflate his sense of achievement.
Caught between these two extremes is Phil and Simm's performance of understated charm serves as the perfect balance. Feeling somewhat lost without the routine of school and with his best mate Ted AWOL, Phil drifts through a dead-end summer job at a bakery whilst indulging in his pastime of photography, not really knowing what he wants to do with his life, or what he wants from it. The developments of his friends - Matt gets engaged and Steve's behaviour becomes increasingly strange - provides him with some surprising distractions, but he only gets something of his own when his Shona, his outgoing Irish cousin (Emer McCourt) visits, leading to romance. This too however, proves to be a momentary distraction and, when his father attempts suicide, Phil must ultimately make a decision to either accept his lot and become absorbed by his peers and the culture around him, or break out and seek to achieve his potential.
Boson Kickout is a sadly overlooked film, perhaps because it was quickly lost in the wave of more successful and better remembered films such as Trainspotting and Human Traffic, which also starred Simm, an effective poster boy for the Britpop 90s, and featured some of the same production team, including a producer credit Emer McCourt. It's a shame, because I think overall Boston Kickout is a more contemplative and mature offering than the enjoyably cartoonish antics of Human Traffic, with themes that are perhaps less dated, and is certainly better than the Trainspotting wannabes that followed in its wake. It's easy to see why Simm, Lincoln and Warren went on to bigger and better things, but sadly Valente and Hanson did not, and their somewhat anonymous performances perhaps tell that tale.
I'd recommend the film for anyone who grew up or came of age in the 1990s, it's choice soundtrack (Oasis, The Stone Roses, Primal Scream etc) and the fashions (I was amused to see that Ted dressed exactly like I did in the '90s and the early '00s - I had exactly the same leather jacket and a fondness for obscure T-shirts, and given that I have short dark, wavy/curly hair just like Lincoln's, it was quite an out-of-body experience!) will certainly bring back memories, and if you lived in a new town or a dead end town, you'll appreciate that sense of being young and alive but being held back and a little scared of taking the leap. It's not perfect, but it is a funny and touching coming-of-age drama that I had a good time with.
Oh and the title? It refers to the game that Phil et al played as kids, jumping over the fences of neighbouring homes and trashing their gardens.
