This useful new book from a busy cultural commentator is well titled. Everything and the Kitchen Sink offers a hurried – sometimes too hurried – survey of the films, TV and, to a lesser extent, music that entertained Britain in the years before the Beatles changed everything.
It is not a history of “kitchen sink” realism. You will find a balanced study of how Cy Enfield’s indestructible Zulu (1964) engaged with colonialism. Joseph Losey’s masterpiece The Servant (1963) – shot “as the Profumo Scandal was unfolding” – moved in wealthier circles. But kitchen sink is certainly the prevailing mood here.
In an excellent introduction Matthews imagines a sort of all-purpose, easily adjustable film of that windy genre. In “an England clogged with coal smoke” a man called Albert, Harry or Vic “smokes continuously” while drinking “beer in copious amounts”. The character might leave Bradford or Halifax for London in “a grimy black steam locomotive”. Or he might not.
Think of Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Sometimes he is a she. Think of Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey (1961). Matthews assiduously digs through the archives to discover more obscure projects rarely rescreened on television. One can understand why the Beatles turned down The Yellow Teddy Bears – a borderline-exploitation flick that might still unnerve the Daily Mail – but that 1963 film sounds ripe for cult rediscovery.
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Everything and the Kitchen Sink by Simon Matthews: A survey of entertainment in pre-Beatles Britain
Some object to the term as classist, but one knows Kitchen Sink when one sees it. As Matthews acknowledges – though not in quite these words – if a still from the film would makes sense on the cover of an LP or single by The Smiths then it almost certainly qualifies.
The author’s race through the movement is useful for its location of origins amid the decline in deference that attended the Labour government’s redrawing of Britain during the postwar years. He gets that antiheroes such as social-climbing Joe Lampton from Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959) anticipated the arrival of Thatcherism two decades hence.
A thoughtful closing chapter notes that, though those films and books were often stoked in misery, they paved the way for later work by Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. The author, acknowledging a subsequent decline in education investment, ends up looking back with something a little like anger. Which seems appropriate.
