#britgrit #films #crimefiction #comedy: A Couple of Charlies- Charlie Higson & Charlie Bubbles.
Is Charlie Higson The Godfather Of Brit Grit?
At some point in the ‘90s, I managed to end up on the guest list for a press screening of Robert Benton’s crime drama, Twilight. The screening was - I think - in Mr Young’s Preview Theatre in the heart of London’s Soho.
It was a dangerous thing to invite me to; there was free food and drink. But there you go!
Various press types were there, including an American with a grating voice and the great Kim Newman – who was being as witty and funny and clever as you’d want.
Just before the film was due to start, a figure wearing what looked like a shabby raincoat – but was probably some swanky designer clobber- and carrying a rattling, clinking plastic bag turned up.
It was Charlie Higson, who at the time was film critic for Red Magazine. Higson sat behind me during the film and – it seemed to my overly booze- sensitive ears – worked his way through a fair number of the bottles of beer that were in the carrier bag. Of course, it could have been Evian but that’s not very gritty, is it?
Higson, at that time, was best known as one of the stars and writers of The Fast Show – a brilliantly funny and bitter-sweet comedy sketch show that has been much imitated and never bettered. Now, he is probably best known as the author of the hugely successful Young James Bond YA books.
But he is also the writer of a bunch of dark and funny urban crime/ horror novels that led him to be described as “The missing link between Dick Emery and Bret Easton Ellis”.
King Of The Ants, his 1992 début novel, is the story of Sean, a pretty useless builder’s labourer, who covets the rich peoples’ homes that he works on and is offered a dodgy surveillance job which then turns into a contract kill. And worse.
King Of the Ants was praised by the great Patricia Highsmith, no less, and the praise is deserved. It is a classic piece of Brit Grit noir, full of bitterness, resentment and underachievement. And humour.
This was followed by more cracking books, including The Full Whack, the cruel and hilarious story of a former football hooligan who is trying to sort his life out when he encounters a couple of blasts from the past that are positively seismic.
Charlie Higson will probably be up for an OBE or something soon but don’t worry ‘bout the rocks that he’s got – Charlie Higson has TRUE BRIT GRIT.
CRIME FICTION LOVER recently reviewed his latest novel WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH THE NIGHT and it looks to be a corker!
Paul Burke recently interviewed Charlie Higson HERE.
“Are you still working sir or do you just do the writing now?”
Charlie Bubbles (1967) is the only film the great Albert Finney ever directed.
Charlie is successful writer; an aging angry young man who – jaded and cynical, drunk and disorderly – living in London. He decides to go home again to revisit his ex-wife and child in the North, where he was born, dragging along his wraith like and waif like secretary, Liza Minnelli.
Charlie roams the frozen wastelands of post WW2 Salford in a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III convertible looking like a fish out of water, unable to find the ‘roots’ that he was once so keen to free himself from.
The ‘false values ‘ of the South are thrown in Bubbles face by old friends although for me the key scene takes place in a swanky Manchester hotel room when an elderly waiter says:
“I used to know your father sir. We’re all very proud of you. Are you still working sir or do you just do the writing now?” Bubbles retorts “No. Just the writing.”
The film’s writer was the splendid Shelagh Delaney who also wrote A Taste of Honey and Lindsay Anderson’s 1967 film The White Bus and indeed Charlie Bubbles straddles the kitchen sink drama of Finney’s classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and the more psychedelic British films to come such as Anderson’s If…. (1968).
Charlie Bubbles the film, like Charlie Bubbles the man, is bittersweet and not to everyone’s taste but personally I love it.
Oh, and the names are great too.
Albert Finney – Charlie Bubbles, Colin Blakely – Smokey Pickles, Billie Whitelaw – Lottie Bubbles!
I saw "Charlie Bubbles" on TV far too young to get it, but it stayed with me, though I tend to confuse it with "Billy Liar" (in a way they'd make a good double bill, thematically). I'd like to watch it again as I think Albert Finney is fantastic in everything including "Erin Brokovich" and "Before the Devil Knows Your Dead". I'd also like to see "Two For the Road" even though the writer, Frederic Raphael, is, like Christopher Hampton, an insufferably self-important toff (IMHO) Did you meet Robert Benton? He co-wrote "Bonnie and Clyde" and seemed to make the kind of intelligent thrillers they don't make much anymore.