Week #6 2020: Nuts in May
I was once on a train from Glasgow to London. Around Newcastle, a man who had clearly of late been on very good terms with the dining car’s charms sat down at a table nearby, full of the joys of the world. Sharing with an affable mother and her child, he asked questions he didn’t take interest in the answers for, told incomplete anecdotes, jokes only he could make out, until the serious requests started rolling in. ‘Is there any chance you could go up to the bar and buy me four cans? I’d go myself, but my legs are tired. ‘Ere’s the money.’ The mother declined, even when he offered to babysit in her absence (she was shockingly unassured by, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a paedophile.’). He shuffled his way down the aisle, to a middle class couple, a man and a woman who had been enduring him with increasing pique. He approached the woman, asked her for his cans, at which point, the man half stood, letting out a half-squealed ‘SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ In his mind, he was clearly aiming for some Pacino-level firepower, but there was a moment of silence that followed this outburst, like waters held aloft, before half the carriage restrained its laughter and the other half released it. (He was subsequently told off by the empathetic guard for jeering as the drunk man was escorted off the train, in a final piece of abjection).
Territoriality, barely restrained anger, badly unleashed anger: it’s got everything that modern Britain is made of, just like Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May (1976). A TV movie, and tribute to resourcefulness (just 84 minutes long, shot on 16mm), it was one of the first films Leigh made in his run of TV plays, a heavy sack of treats (Abigail’s Party, Meantime), oddments (The Permissive Society) and brief pleasures (The Short & Curlies). This period was more than an apprenticeship – even when some of the work isn’t superb, it is certain of itself – but it also reminds you how little the current TV boom has given directors space to experiment. Back in those days, before the BBC was harmonised with the market capital principles of popularity as a universal yardstick, there was a belief in ‘good work’. One might imagine that today’s streamers, unshackled from the indisputable facts of Nielsen ratings, could take a broader view of success. Having a shingle at Play for Today was not like having a Netflix deal; the streamers are interested in the business of buying names, not making them, and a failure to capture attention and plaudits means you won’t be invested in the next time (whither go Adam Leon, Babak Anvari et al?). Perhaps it makes sense that no one these days would recommission you after making something as morbid and stilted as Leigh’s The Kiss of Death (1977), to let people make work only to metabolise ideas, push concepts to their limit, work with different groups of people. But I doubt Leigh would have made a film as assuredly scabrous as Naked, if he hadn’t made a less successful version nearly twenty years before.
Nuts in May requires no special pleading. It’s simple story – a couple go on a camping holiday, are frustrated by their boorish campmates, have an altercation, find a new campsite – told with slow release specificity, like dripped acid. Genuinely funny throughout, it hits Leigh’s sweet spot of a social realist subject, blended with performances and a script that is just north-north east of realism. Keith Pratt (Roger Sloman) and Candice-Marie (Alison Steadman) hope to escape to the country, but it’s more accurate to say what they are running to than what they are running from: the city (of Croydon). They’re a curious pair. There’s an edge of Good Life hippiedom about their search for unpasteurised milk, their shunning of meat. Almost any Guardian online comment can be read in Keith’s voice. They are seeking out the unturning truths of the English countryside, rather than hitting the ejector seat on Britain, heading off for the then ubiquitous package holiday.
But, like most rebels, they’re defined by what they’re rebelling against, rather than creating their own way. Sexless in the age of sexual liberation (Candice-Marie’s request for Keith to ‘kiss Prudence’, her cuddly toy cat, is as passionate as their nights get) and paternalistic in the age of feminist foment (‘Let me handle this Candice-Marie’), they’re seeking something in the countryside that never existed in the first place, like Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s doubly false vision of New Zealand as ‘like Britain in the nineteen-fifties’. When they stop to enquire of a farmer whether they can have some of his fresh milk, he brushes them off, assuring them it’s illegal to sell it to them. Keith leaves, full in the belief that the real rustic life lives elsewhere. Keith’s relentless sticking to the schedule, his checking of the guidebook rather than the thing itself (‘What’s that?’ asks Candice-Marie at Corfe Castle. ‘That’s number 4!’ replies Keith, checking his 20p map) rejects the real notion of the place they’re visiting just as more than someone seeking hameggandchips on the Costa del Sol. Pushing their noses up to the glass of the natural experiences other people are having, they are disgusted by the caged chickens, by people genuinely living with the land rather than cosplaying it.
Nuts in May has a lot in common with folk horror films that boomed in the ‘70s. Emotional and sexual repression sit side by side with the temptations of a free life, people excavate ancient sites and the locals are very unfriendly to outsiders, except here the protagonists are running from the nightmare of transistor radios, fried sausages, stack heels and coarse humour rather than dangerous pagans out to burn them in a pyre. Council worker Keith and toy shop assistant Candice-Marie are class aspirants, keen to keep the contagion of working class life well away, keen to follow rules, to save money, read the guidebook, keep to the path. If you were in doubt about the film’s macabre undertones, Leigh’s original title for the teleplay – Eaten by a Pig – was also how he saw Keith’s eventual end. He sidestepped this macabre finale, finding Keith merely perturbed by a hearty porker as he heads off for his constitutional, spade in hand.
Keith and Candice-Marie are essentially fragile. What’s both reassuring and painful to see in 2020 is that the mildly comfortable have always been reactionary long before their sights were targeted on the racial other. Moments after glam rocker Brummies Honky and Finger show up to the campsite (‘Look at those bleedin’ bluebells!’), Keith and Candice-Marie are marking their territory. ‘We were here first.’ ‘Everything was peaceful until you came along!’ Keith is ready to defend himself and his patch, his shred of sanity.
In the film’s climax, Keith – so incensed that Finger and Honky are making an open fire to cook sausages, in ‘clear contravention’ of the campsite’s rules – loses his mind and wields a huge stick against Honky. All of my favourite fights on screen have the bathos of real life: less Fight Club and more flailing limbs in a kebab shop ruck. Keith’s last warning words – ‘Now, don’t be silly’ – might as well be a British war cry. His tantrum ends with him running off into the woods, tears in his eyes (‘I’m… only trying to advise you for your own good.’). It’s fun to contrast Nuts in May with another 1976 film about rage, and a man’s desire to turn society towards his ends using violent means: Taxi Driver. God’s lonely man in a roll neck sweater and plimsolls, Keith’s rampage has nowhere to go. America has a rage that can wash the streets clean. Britain has an impotent tantrum, no wider than the country you can drive across in twenty-four hours. No myth of redemptive violence; you’ll just end up looking a wally. And then, rage unacknowledged, misdirected, changing nothing, the final move is, of course, to leave. They head off the campsite, seeking a better life, away from all these horrible people. It takes no stretch of imagination to see Nuts in May in the context of Brexit.
One of the truths of the British sitcom is not that hell is other people: it’s tolerating them that’s the hell. From Last of the Summer Wine to Only Fools and Horses to The Trip (this scene in particular could be a deleted scene from Nuts in May), the balance is always between enduring Grandad’s war stories to exploding in rage. But in the sitcom, reconciliation is the name of the game with everything returning to first position for next week’s episode. Nuts in May feels like a sitcom, but it doesn’t need to stick to its patterns. As Keith and Candice-Marie drive off the reservation, they are confronted with genuine authority, stopped by a policeman on the roadside. Like all reactionaries, they are lovers of rules except when they discover that they apply to them as well. Keith is shocked to learn his bald spare tire and blocked rear view puts him at risk of a caution. The policeman lets him off with a caution, Keith balling his rage up for another day and another stick to be wielded who knows where.
This week’s recommendations
If you’ve got 36 minutes, this short by Mike Leigh is terrific. Scripted by and starring Jim Broadbent (one of the few things Leigh has directed that he didn’t write), it starts off as a pitch perfect imitation of the upper classes then goes somewhere savage, surreal yet totally logical.
Have you ever read Mr Bridge and Mrs Bridge, a pair of novels by Evan S. Connell? It’s a superb diptych that tells the story of a novel from each partner’s side with a completely different tone and mostly different incidents revealing completely different defining moments.
‘With the Day Comes the Dawn’ by Anna Domino.