Youth unemployment is a perennial problem, but this ATV film from 1972 documents a particularly challenging period for a troubled community. Exploring the efforts of central Liverpool’s Bronte Youth Centre, it follows a group of Merseyside school-leavers as they face up to inescapable fate on the dole, trying to fill their time playing table tennis and football.
Youth unemployment is a perennial problem, but this ATV film from 1972 documents a particularly challenging period for a troubled community. Exploring the efforts of central Liverpool’s Bronte Youth Centre, it follows a group of Merseyside school-leavers as they face up to inescapable fate on the dole, trying to fill their time playing table tennis and football.
In 1970s England, three blue-collar friends spend their days joking, drinking, fighting and chasing girls. Freddie wants to leave their working-class world but cool, charismatic Bruce and lovable loser Snork are happy with life the way it is. When Freddie gets a new job as a door-to-door salesman and bumps into his old school sweetheart Julie, the gang are forced to make choices that will change their lives for ever.
Bud is a lonely and quiet boy whose moments of solace occur when he sits in rapture at the local cinema, watching towering and iconic figures on the movie screen. The movies give Bud the strength to get through another day as he deals with his oppressive school environment and his burgeoning homosexuality.
A rebellious teenager, future Beatle John Lennon lives with his Aunt Mimi in working-class mid-1950s Liverpool, England. Mimi's husband suddenly dies, and John spies his mother Julia at the funeral. Despite Mimi's misgivings, John intends to have a real relationship with his mother. Julia introduces him to popular music and the banjo and, though a family conflict looms, young John is inspired to form his own band.
Follow a group of children who are evacuated to a Yorkshire village during the Second World War, where they encounter a young soldier who, like them, is far away from home.
Will is looking for an escape from his family when he encounters Lee, the school bully. Armed with a video camera and a copy of Rambo, Lee plans to make his own action-packed video epic.
Manchester, 1976. Tony Wilson is an ambitious but frustrated local TV news reporter looking for a way to make his mark. After witnessing a life-changing concert by a band known as the Sex Pistols, he persuades his station to televise one of their performances, and soon Manchester's punk groups are clamoring for him to manage them. Riding the wave of a musical revolution, Wilson and his friends create the legendary Factory Records label and The Hacienda club.
An advertising man is slowly sliding downhill. When he is fired from his job in Detroit, he signs up for unemployment. One day they find him a job: teaching thinking skills to Army recruits. He arrives on base to find that there is no structure set up for the class.
After deciding he needs to do something meaningful with his life, high school wrestler Louden Swain sets out on a mission to drop weight and challenge the area's undefeated champion, which creates problems with his teammates and health. Matters are complicated further when Louden's father takes in an attractive female drifter who's on her way to San Francisco.
Capturing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in their electrifying element, 'A Hard Day's Night' is a wildly irreverent journey through this pastiche of a day in the life of The Beatles during 1964. The band have to use all their guile and wit to avoid the pursuing fans and press to reach their scheduled television performance, in spite of Paul's troublemaking grandfather and Ringo's arrest.
A working-class family in London's East End is struggling to stay afloat during the recession under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's premiership. Only the mother Mavis is working; father Frank and the couple's two sons Colin, a timid, chronically shy individual and Mark, an outspoken, headstrong young man, are on the dole. This situation is contrasted by the presence of Mavis's sister Barbara, and her husband John, whose financial and social loftiness appears to be a comfortable facade over the unspoken soreness of a lackluster marriage.