Film review: 'The Ploughman's Lunch' A peep behind the headlines
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-06-30Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 11 →
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RESOLATE APPRE
LIKE IT or not, these are the guys and girls that turn out the news we are fed each day on TV, radio and newspapers.
James Penfield, Radio 4 news editor, is the central figure of 'The Ploughman's Lunch' Impervious to external events, he drifts through his selfish, cloistered, cosseted and unscrupulous existence with an eye for nothing but the clock on the studio wall and the main chance.
Not overtly political himself, he simply conforms to the pressures of the conservative establishment which controls or owns the mass media.
A few months of his halting progress up the social and professional ladder are traced in the film against the vivid backdrop of Tory conference 1982: 'the starkest horror' Britain during the Falklands war.
Skilful combinations of old soundtrack and pictures from the summer of 1982 create an impression of reality which reaches its starkest horror with the widescreen - life-size - shots of the Tory Party conference.
Penfield - for reasons best known to himself - fancies charmless snooty TV executive Susan Barrington. He is introduced to her by her old friend Jeremy (a newspaper journalist) who is also James's best friend.
His pursuit of the understandably unimpressed Susan runs alongside his werk on a book on the Suez crisis of 1956. a key source of material proves to be Susan's socialist historian mother, who herself has a half-completed book on it.
He visits hoping that a combined operation he can come away with both her notes and her daughter - and masquerades uncomfortably as a socialist. To his surprise he finds her mum more forthcoming in every way -and beats an ungainly retreat.
The clinching (illicitly filmed) scenes take place at the Tory Party conference, where Jeremy and Susan are working, and James has tagged along. As Thatcher's speech reaches its climactic warhe has been elbowed aside.
As an expose of the shallow, selfish and reactionary characters who pump out the news each day, The Ploughman's Lunch is sharp if not particularly-new or deep.
Much of it remains on a purely personal level - indeed James's nastiness is laid on with a trowel.
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whoop, James sees Susan and Jeremy embrace and realises that