CULTURE JASON SOLOMONS
MIKE LEIGH never wanted to be labelled a Jewish film maker. He confessed to me several years ago that Woody Allen’s Radio Days was one of his favourite films because it echoed on a very personal, family level, with all the shouting and relatives and his own retreat into a world of radio plays and music.
Leigh’s career is similar to that of the obviously Jewish Allen in that he is regularly nominated for awards as a screenwriter, that he is prolific and that he has a unique way of working that he lets nobody interfere with. It would be reductive to call him the British Woody Allen but, following his remarkable confessional with Alan Yentob in which he spoke of the early Jewish influences on his films, let’s look at the work itself. Just how Jewish are Mike Leigh’s films?
ABIGAIL’S PARTY 1977
Although it aired as a BBC Play for Today, this has become one of Leigh’s key works of both stage and screen. The suburban setting, the fashionable cocktails and music (Demis Roussos, Jose Feliciano) are all instantly recognisable to anyone who grew up in the aspirational environs of middle-class Jewry, particularly the London enclaves such as Edgware and Ilford. Indeed, although it’s never mentioned, the characters of Beverly Moss and her estate agent husband Laurence, could easily be Jewish. We’ll claim them, anyway. J Factor:
HIGH HOPES 1988
Leigh’s cinema career re-ignited with this King’s Cross-set satire. Lead character Cyril is a motorbike courier and although there is much made of property and aspiration and how we look after our relatives, there isn’t much obviously Jewish. J Factor:
LIFE IS SWEET 1990
Set mainly among a bickering north London family often in their sitting room, this could now look like an early episode of Gogglebox (the TV show which has a Jewish family on one of its many sofas). It’s the warmth of Alison Steadman’s doughty