Living on the Edge

A documentary examining the lives and attitudes of working class Britons: a Devon farming family forced through bankruptcy to abandon their land after 40 years; a jobless family imprisoned on a Birkenhead housing estate; members of a South Wales mining community, bemoaning their reputation during the strike as 'the enemy within'; young Glaswegians travelling to London in search of work. Keenly analytical and wide ranging, Grigsby's film presents an impressionistic mosaic of the sundry intertwined forces that have wrecked the lives of these intelligent, articulate people. Political history, increasingly rampant consumerism, popular songs, archive radio and film material, all serve to illuminate the feeling that a massive portion of the population has been sold down the line. Poetic, perceptive and often profoundly moving as it monitors the sine wave from the Depression of the '30s to that of the present, the film's illustration that 'in the '30s people had principles; now they've got mortgages and cars' would be totally depressing, were it not for the sheer resilience of these people about whom the government barely cares.