‘In this damn country which we hate and love’: revisiting My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

‘I believe primarily that dramatists are story tellers. … Good writing, born of reality, is the highest form of consciousness. And it is in itself a revolt, it is criticism, protest, rebellion against kitsch, against all forms of domination, against ignorance and prejudice.’ – Hanif Kureishi, ‘The Writer’s Theatre’ (undated)

Commissioned in the early years of Channel 4 television by C4’s founding chief executive Jeremy Isaacs and his ‘head of fiction’ David Rose – the founding father of Film on Four, which later became Film4 – and shot on location in six weeks on 16mm film by the Leicester-born director Stephen Frears for £650,000, My Beautiful Laundrette was not conceived as a movie for cinema release. Britain’s new fourth TV channel had launched in November 1982 with a radical vision (barely evident today) which included rethinking the relationship between TV and film in the UK. The initial plan was to offer filmmakers the chance to make features which would be screened on TV, possibly preceded by a short, promotional, cinema release. On a budget of just £6 million per year, in the first ten years Rose commissioned more than 130 completed feature-length films; half achieved a cinema release. Of these, Laundrette was the first big hit which changed the plan.

My Beautiful Laundrette is and can be credited with many things: transforming C4 into the new key force in 1980s to 1990s British film production, making Daniel Day Lewis (who played Johnny) a star, launching the British independent production company Working Title (today part-owned by Universal Studios), as a bold breakthrough in gay and British Asian representation, and as a step-change in the style, tone and ambitions of British film. In line with this hybridity, the reinvention of one of the defining, most praised and debated, British films of the 1980s Thatcher decade as theatre is wholly fitting. Indeed, the theatre is where Hanif Kureishi – born in 1954 in middle-class South London suburbia to a British mother and a Pakistani father – started out as a young writer.