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Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) is playing July 16 - August 15, 2017 in the United States as part of the series John Schlesinger's First Masterpieces.Billy Fisher, a cheerful twenty-something lad from Yorkshire, is going to have a great future. For now, he only has a small office position in his dull small city, but Billy has already landed a job in London writing for a popular TV comedian. He is also working on a novel that soon enough will bring him fame and fortune. He is also engaged to a girl. Actually, two girls. And he doesn’t really want to marry any of them. Also, the TV star doesn’t really know that Billy exists. And he hasn’t started on the novel. Billy just has a vivid imagination and speaks before he thinks—some people prefer to call it compulsive lying.

Alex Westthorp Sep 19, 2016

We revisit Tom's Midnight Garden, Moondial, The Chronicles Of Narnia and a few lesser-known UK children's TV series...

Read our look-back at UK kids' fantasy dramas 1980 - 1984 here.

By 1985 British TV's children's drama had really hit its stride, achieving "a balanced diet of programmes" as Edward Barnes, the head of the BBC children's department observed. The late 80s, arguably, saw a new golden age for spooky and magical kids drama. Excellent production values, improved significantly by well-honed special effects work using Quantel, Paintbox and Harry, and moreover some interesting casting - often of very talented newcomers - produced some of the most memorable dramas of the era.

The second half of the decade saw the BBC riding high on the back of the success of their state-of-the-art adaptation of John Masefield's Box Of Delights. Meanwhile, anthology series Dramarama was going from strength to strength on ITV.

Ron Moody in Mel Brooks' 'The Twelve Chairs.' The 'Doctor Who' that never was. Ron Moody: 'Doctor Who' was biggest professional regret (See previous post: "Ron Moody: From Charles Dickens to Walt Disney – But No Harry Potter.") Ron Moody was featured in about 50 television productions, both in the U.K. and the U.S., from the late 1950s to 2012. These included guest roles in the series The Avengers, Gunsmoke, Starsky and Hutch, Hart to Hart, and Murder She Wrote, in addition to leads in the short-lived U.S. sitcom Nobody's Perfect (1980), starring Moody as a Scotland Yard detective transferred to the San Francisco Police Department, and in the British fantasy Into the Labyrinth (1981), with Moody as the noble sorcerer Rothgo. Throughout the decades, he could also be spotted in several TV movies, among them:[1] David Copperfield (1969). As Uriah Heep in this disappointing all-star showcase distributed theatrically in some countries.

Part I. Anger, Suez and Archie Rice

“There they are,” George Devine told John Osborne, surveying The Entertainer‘s opening night audience. “All waiting for you…Same old pack of c***s, fashionable assholes. Just more of them than usual.” The Royal Court had arrived: no longer outcasts, they were London’s main attraction.

Look Back in Anger vindicated Devine’s model of a writer’s-based theater. Osborne’s success attracted a host of dramatists to Sloane Square. There’s Shelagh Delaney, whose A Taste of Honey featured a working-class girl pregnant from an interracial dalliance; Harold Pinter’s The Room, a bizarre “comedy of menace”; and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, which aimed a Gatling gun at its audience. Devine encouraged them, however bold or experimental. “You always knew he was on the writer’s side,” Osborne said.

Peter O’Toole called the Royal Court actors “an...

I met Peter O'Toole in a night-school class at the Leeds College of Commerce in the early 1950s, where we were both doing an English literature O-level as part of the young journalists' training scheme.

One of the set books that year was a volume of Tennyson and Browning, and Peter asked if he could borrow my edition until he could buy one of his own. But that was the last I saw of either him or the book, until, that is, I was commissioned in 1959 to write a profile of Willis Hall, whose The Long and the Short and the Tall was running in the West End with O'Toole in one of the starring roles.

I mentioned the lost volume to Willis and there followed an invitation to join them both at a London theatre pub where, in spite of the alcoholic haze, I seem to remember the book being gracefully returned.

(John Schlesinger, 1963, Studiocanal, 15)

One of the key movies of the British new wave, Billy Liar began life in 1959 as a brilliant comic novel by Keith Waterhouse (clearly influenced by James Thurber's 1939 New Yorker story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), and in 1960 Waterhouse and his regular writing partner Willis Hall turned it into a play that Lindsay Anderson directed in the West End. It was filmed 50 years ago this month under the direction of former actor and documentary maker John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay (who took over the title role on stage from Albert Finney) is superb as the sad 19-year-old Billy Fisher, who escapes from his dreary lower-middle-class background and dead-end job as an undertaker's clerk through his dreams of becoming a writer, his habitual lying, and his fantasies about being a hero in the imaginary country of Ambrosia.

The film takes place over a single busy Saturday during which he juggles two fiancees,...

Outstanding actor of stage and screen who made his name as Bri in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg

The British theatre changed for ever when Joe Melia, as the sardonic teacher Bri, pushed a severely disabled 10-year-old girl in a wheelchair on to the stage of the Glasgow Citizens in May 1967 and proceeded to make satirical jokes about the medical profession while his marriage was disintegrating. The play was Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which transformed the way disability was discussed on the stage. It made the names overnight of its author, the director Michael Blakemore, and Melia. Albert Finney took over the role of Bri on Broadway.

Flat-footed, slightly hunched, always leaning towards a point of view, Melia, who has died aged 77, was a distinctive and compassionate actor who brought a strain of the music hall to the stage, a sense of being an outsider.

Someone actually wants to make a Hollywood film of 80s kids' series Worzel Gummidge? Shouldn't they get their thinking head on?

Age: 76.

Appearance: Scruffy, dirty, turnip for a head.

Either you're looking in a mirror … Very funny.

… Or we're strolling down memory lane. Wasn't this a kids' TV show 30-odd years ago? It certainly was. Worzel was a scarecrow with interchangeable heads for specific activities such as thinking, dancing or working. He had a comedy West Country accent and spent 30 episodes getting into tight spots from which he had to be rescued by a pair of kids. There was nothing he liked more than "a cup o' tea an' a slice o' cake".

Sounds terrible. That's "classic" TV for you.

Who was to blame for it? Barbara Euphan Todd wrote the books, but the TV scripts were by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, who also worked together on the film Billy Liar.

Billy Liar, a story of smalltown frustration, captivated a generation, pre-empted the 60s – and even inspired Oasis. As the stage play returns, Laura Barton asks Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie why it endures

'I don't think about Billy Liar very often." Tom Courtenay's voice hovers on the line. We have been discussing his upcoming holiday to the north-east coast, splashing about in the warm shallows of the present-day; at this detour into the past, he pauses, and retreats a little. "If I read it now, it would make me laugh," he concludes lightly, distantly. "But I honestly don't know why it's lasted. Who can say why some things are successful?"

It is now 50 years since Keith Waterhouse's novel transferred to the stage, casting in its title role first Albert Finney and later, Courtenay. Published in 1959, Billy Liar has, over those five decades, enjoyed a rich and varied existence,...