That Omar is gay – and largely unapologetically so, in private at least – caused consternation among the Asian Muslim community worldwide, for whom the issue of homosexuality is, by and large, taboo.
Director Stephen Frears was hooked immediately by what the film had to say about Britain in the 1980s.
I read the script and just had to meet Hanif Kureishi. His mother was White British and his father was from Pakistan, so he lived and observed both cultures simultaneously. I mean, I was just white and middle class, so learning from him about that life was really eye-opening. I thought the critique of Mrs Thatcher was really the most important thing, I didn’t notice that there were gay themes that were going to echo around the world.
But My Beautiful Laundrette doesn’t preach, doesn’t try to ‘tick boxes’ and has a magic ‘common touch’, which appealed to a wide audience. And Omar is constantly faced with the dilemma of whether he can eat the cake he has.
Souad Faress played Cherry, the manipulative Uncle Salim’s wife, who questions where Omar’s true identity lies. In the film she cries, ‘I’m sick of hearing about these in-betweens, people should make up their mind about where they are!’ Looking back, Souad says:
I loved the script. Cherry’s view is, ‘Right, you have to side with us or side with them.’ There’s degrees of racism on both sides, but it made people at least look at the issues how they really are. One thing that seemed to bewilder people was that the immigrant family, the Pakistani family, were so aspirational. They were a wealthy middle class family, but people just didn’t equate immigrants with success, yet it has been proven over and over and over that in Britain’s social history immigrants are very aspirational.
Powders – the name of the Launderette in the film – was on Wilcox Road in Vauxhall, south London. Today it’s a Portuguese restaurant.
CUSHING THE BLOW – WHEN DR WHO BOMBED WITH THE FANS
In 1965, Doctor Who hit the big screen in eye-popping widescreen and retina-burning Technicolor, with Peter Cushing in the titular role. Dr. Who and the Daleks followed very closely the plot of ‘The Daleks’, the first, (black-and-white) encounter between the TV Doctor, played by William Hartnell, and the psychopathic pepperpots.
A sequel, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150AD, landed on screen less than a year later. Cushing again starred as Dr Who in the story that was, also again, a remake of a Doctor Who TV serial originally starring Hartnell. In both films, Cushing travels through time and space with three companions: his granddaughters, played by Roberta Tovey and Jill Curzon (the 1961 Women’s Clay Pigeon shooting world champion, no less), and a companion who has stumbled on the Tardis by mistake. In the first film, this was Roy Castle; in the second, it was Bernard Cribbins, who would later play a significant role in the rebooted TV show during David Tennant’s tenure.
The films were rushed out to cash in on the craze for all things Dalek that had swept the nation since their TV debut. Amicus, the producers, bought the rights to adapt the stories and characters from the BBC for £500. (The rights were limited, which explains why the famously spooky theme from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – composed by Delia Derbyshire – is absent from the films and replaced by a racy, but rather ordinary, orchestral score). Terry Nation, the television writer who came up with the Daleks, had held on to the rights of his creation and was free to exploit his weaponised bollards with whomsoever he wanted. This is the reason the Daleks were also spun off into comic scripts that didn’t feature Doctor Who characters.
In order to part-finance the second film, Amicus struck a £50,000 deal with Quaker Oats. In spite of being levelled by Dalek death rays, London is completely riddled with product placement: the huge billboard posters prominently displayed in the film suggest that in the far-flung future, the British eat nothing but, – surprise, surprise – Quaker’s Sugar-Puffs.
The sets in both films are impressive, especially the post-Dalek-induced apocalypse scenes set in London. The Daleks – which, who knew cancelled, come in a variety of colours denoting rank – look twice as menacing in vivid colour. It’s only a shame the proposed Dalek flame-throwers were nixed at the last minute in case they gave kids nightmares – or the wrong sort of inspiration for their homemade versions. Instead the Daleks in both films fire deadly gas (actually carbon dioxide from fire extinguishers).
The distinctive flying saucer in which the Daleks travelled to London – their evil plan to remove the Earth’s core via a huge mine in, of course, the suburb of Shepperton – was dusted down and recycled three years later for the utterly terrible British sci-fi film The Body Stealers. That film starred Neil Connery – brother of Sean – and was probably responsible for his almost total screen obscurity since.
It has to be said, the Dalek films are far from classics – even the legend Peter Cushing delivers a ropey turn – but they do have a lot of charm and they don’t even approach the awfulness of the TV Doctor Who of the mid to late 1980s. However both films drive ‘true’ Doctor Who fans to despair because – they say – Peter Cushing is an imposter. And it’s true, the films took a lot of liberties with the Doctor Who legend.
If you weren’t familiar with the TV show in the 60s – if you were American, say – you’d be flummoxed by the backstory, so the producers understandably simplified it for the widest possible audience. What was unforgivable for fans, however, is that Peter Cushing played a dotty human grandad who was an inventor not a Time Lord and whose surname was, actually, ‘Who’. The true Doctor is extraterrestrial and nobody knows his name. The suffix ‘Who’ is applied by the people he encounters, as in ‘Who are you?’ That’s the reason why you never see Peter Cushing included in the canonical lineup. You could argue that this all seems a bit churlish – after all, this is Peter Cushing we’re talking about, one of the true greats of cult British films and also a cast member of the original Star Wars (and recently reanimated by CGI for Rogue One). However, there are some things in the universe you tinker with at your peril – and chief among them is the Doctor Who backstory!
ANY SIMILARITIES TO MARY POPPINS ARE PURELY COINCIDENTAL. HONEST!
An apprentice witch, a trio of cockney urchins and a cowardly spiv search for the missing component to a magic spell useful for thwarting the Nazi invasion of Britain. Not a recently released wartime MI5 file, unfortunately, but the plot of Disney’s ballsy, brash comedy-musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, tipped at the time to become an absolute classic of the studio’s canon.
It had all the makings of one: a stellar cast that included Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, Roddy McDowall and Bruce Forsyth; a cracking set of songs by the Sherman Brothers; impressive special effects and animation sequences; classic baddies (in this case, the German Army); and orphans. It’s a lovely, light-hearted fantasy worthy of Christmas classic status. So why did it fail to make back its productions costs?
Partly, perhaps, because it was so similar to Mary Poppins that the two merged in the consciousness of audiences. It featured the same star – David Tomlinson, Disney’s go-to English twit; the same London setting; the same crew; similar themes (families are weird but they’re all we’ve got); and stylistically very similar songs because they were written by the same songwriting team. Standout number ‘Substitutiary Locomotion’ is basically a rewrite of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, and ‘Portobello Road’ could have been in either film and few would notice the difference. In fact, another of its showstoppers – ‘The Beautiful Briny’ – had been written for Mary Poppins but was dropped at the last moment. In Bedknobs it was simply revoiced for a frantic live action animated sequence that looked like a continuation of the one in… Mary Poppins.
The film was released in 1971, a week prior to the death of Roy Disney, who had been in charge of the magic castle since his brother Walt died in 1966.
That’s not to suggest that the film’s lack of success played a part in his death – it opened strongly and was five times