INTERMISSION

A WRITER TAKES PAUSE TO CONSIDER… His debt to a hairdresser called Rita.

Like most of you, I’m sure, I’ve been watching and loving movies for as long as I can remember. How many people, though, can honestly say a film changed their life? Not in some symbolic way, but in a way that genuinely adjusted its course and trajectory – so much so that, had the film in question not been watched at a specific point in time, the very fabric of their current existence would be incalculably different?

The reason I’m asking is because I can pretty much trace everything I am now back to a summer afternoon in 1983. I’m guessing school had broken up, and I had done what I usually did whenever I had a couple of hours to kill – make for a cinema in my local area and buy a ticket for whatever took my fancy.

On this particular day the film on offer was Educating Rita, Lewis Gilbert’s adaptation of Willy Russell’s 1980 stage play. I’m not sure exactly what it was that appealed, but I suppose I would have known Gilbert from the three Bond films he’d directed, one of which (1979’s Moonraker) had had its British TV premiere the preceding Christmas. I’d have known its star Michael Caine from The Italian Job, The Eagle Has Landed and The Man Who Would Be King, films which played more or less in perpetuity on the four (four!) TV channels we could then choose between. And I guess I would have had a rough idea what the film was about: a working-class hairdresser (Julie Walters) from Liverpool who signs herself up to an Open University course in English Literature.

Before that afternoon, the notion of going to university had been no more than an airy concept. No one in my family had ever been to one, it being the prevailing wisdom of the time that there was more to be learned in the workplace than in the dusty corridors of academia. Not only that, but everything we’d see on film and television – Chariots Of Fire, for example, or the 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited – made the very reality of university feel remote and unobtainable. The image we had fed to us was of toffs quaffing champers amid stonepaved Oxbridge cloisters – a world of entitlement, heredity and privilege that felt as close to this accountant’s son from Essex as the dark side of the moon.

When I walked out of Educating Rita, though, it was somehow within my reach. I’d watched Julie Walters’ heroine grapple with her sense of inadequacy and come out of it triumphant, charged with purpose and a new-found self-confidence. I’d watched her stare down her sceptical husband and disdainful father and make the changes that she needed to make in order to become a fuller, more complete person. I’d seen her change her job, her hair and even her name in a modern Pygmalion that made Trinity College in Dublin look like the loveliest place on earth. And all of it had shown me something I’d never quite realised before: that life isn’t something that happens to you, but something that you make happen.

In her 2009 autobiography That’s Another Story, Julie Walters writes about people coming up to her in the street to say how Educating Rita gave them “the impetus to try further education and to make changes in their lives”. Well, it definitely did it for me. Had I not seen it, I might never have gone to university, embarked on a career in journalism and met my future wife. Neither would I have been likely to hang out with Julie Walters, something I got to do in 2008 when my fellow critics and I awarded her a lifetime achievement prize. (Had I not gone to uni I would have also not interviewed Lewis Gilbert, a lovely chap who really couldn’t have been nicer when I spoke to him about Shirley Valentine in 1989.)

OK, so it’s entirely possible that things might have turned out more or less the same for me, even if I hadn’t seen Educating Rita all those years ago. Were you to ask me to, though, I could reel off entire scenes from Willy Russell’s script verbatim. I know Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ off by heart because Walters recites it in the film. And years from now, when I’m as tired and decrepit as Caine’s boozy tutor Frank, I’ll still feel a tingle down my spine when I hear David Hentschel’s theme tune: the music we hear playing when Rita waves Frank off at the airport, before turning away decisively to stride into her future.

‘Had I not seen it, I might never have embarked on a career in journalism and met my future wife’