Plymouth on a weekend. Young sailors are in town, mostly in and around Union Street, for two nights of drinking, fighting, picking up girls (prostitutes included) before heading out to sea for several months. There are families and friends and loved ones to say goodbye to. Into this atmosphere arrives Daniel (Gary Oldman). Unknown to anyone, drunk out of his skull, he gets into a fight at a disco and is so badly beaten by a bouncer that he ends up in a coma in hospital. As he lies on life support, the incident has implications for several of the sailors and citizens.

Written by Hugh Stoddart and directed and produced by Colin Gregg, Remembrance is an ensemble piece, interweaving some four storylines over twenty-four hours, from one night to the next, with a few final scenes set the following morning. The storylines revolve around a mystery: who Daniel is, now he is in a coma, and why he was there on Union Street that night. We follow several young men, some saying goodbye to parents, siblings, wives and girlfriends – in the case of Doug (Timothy Spall), impending fatherhood – before they spend several months in close quarters at sea, likely to be putting their lives at risk in the service of their country. (Remembrance was made before the Falklands War, which was under way when it had its UK cinema release, giving the film an extra poignancy in hindsight.) The film is also a portrait of a time and place: Plymouth, a historical naval city and one which, one older character says, has done well out of the seaborne forces, and which had been bombed during World War II, but inevitably about to change. Remembrance was made at the start of the Thatcher era, and club owner Stan (Jon Croft) anticipates that the lively, to say the least, Union Street won’t be long for the world, soon to be flattened to make way for “do-it-yourself supermarkets”.

Remembrance is also notable as a showcase for several leading actors at early stages of their career, their debut in some cases (Gary Oldman for one). There are some older and then more familiar faces in the supporting cast, such as Derek Benfield (then best known for his role over all seven series of the BBC drama serial The Brothers a few years earlier), Myra Frances (as a teacher Steve clashes with at a party) and Kenneth Griffith as Joe, an old man. Gregg’s direction is energetic and the film is well paced over its nearly two hours, bookended by two scenes of violence. While this is undoubtedly a very male-oriented film, it’s not a total sausage-fest, with Stoddart paying some attention to the women in the story. Before what would have been the first reel of a film print is up, the film passes the Bechdel Test with a conversation between Sue (Sally Jane Jackson) and Gail (Michele Winstanley) which for some of its duration isn’t all about men.

The film is also significant as an early Film on Four production. In the 1970s, the largely American investment which had fuelled British cinema in the previous decade, had gone away. What was left largely comprised James Bond, softcore sex comedies, television sitcom spinoffs, the dying years of Hammer and other grittier lower-budget horror films (Pete Walker’s work, for example) and tiny-budget, often experimental work often financed by the British Film Institute. The decade also saw major work from the likes of John Boorman, Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell, often made abroad and/or with overseas funding. However, many directors who had made cinema features spent the decade working on television – Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach among them – with all that implied. Although films in all but name, often shot in 16mm, these small-screen works were made for a single showing, in the Play for Today slot for example, with the possibility of a single repeat within two years. There was little chance of seeing them if you missed the showings, as home video for rental or sale did not exist. However, Channel 4 launched on 2 November 1982 and by that time it had committed, under senior commissioning editor and BBC drama alumnus David Rose (of which more below), to financing low-budget feature films, to be shown on television, with a view to a cinema release beforehand. These would be exempt from the usual embargo period between cinema premiere and small-screen debut, which was then three years, having been reduced from five. Remembrance was one of the first Films on Four, in the can and on the big screen before the channel launched.

While increasing the amount of film production in the UK as much as it did could hardly be a bad thing, there was also some backlash, with comments that Remembrance and films like it were hardly films but instead television plays with ideas above their station. Alan Parker – an advocate of making films for cinemas on “proper” budgets for mainstream audiences, often with major-studio funding – drew a cartoon I can’t link to now which summed this up: an audience in a cinema watching something the size of a postage stamp on the big screen and the comment, “Oh no, not another Channel 4 ‘film’”. You can see the point, to some extent. On the face of it, there isn’t much difference, visually or otherwise, between the likes of Remembrance (shot in Super 16mm) or the recently BFI Blu-rayed Hidden City (35mm) and a film-shot Play for Today that BBC1 was then still broadcasting, other than the widescreen aspect ratio and the ability to include language that the BBC was still vetoing at the time. That applied however distinguished the film or play was, whether it was on the minority channel BBC2 or not, and whatever time of night it was shown at.

Film on Four certainly couldn’t be accused of playing safe, and indeed led with its chin. Its opening night attraction was the Frears-directed Walter, with Ian McKellen as the title character with learning difficulties. Channel 4 had a policy, according to chief executive Jeremy Isaacs based on audience research, of not “sparing people’s blushes”. While strong language had begun to appear in films and television plays by 1982, more so on ITV than on the BBC, Channel 4’s policy created a stir, with newspaper headlines calling the fledgling network “Channel Swore” or “Channel Four-Letter Word”. You could be exposed to some quite adult material within minutes of the nine-o’clock watershed, even though you had been warned by the continuity announcer before the start. That was the case with Remembrance, which had its channel premiere just eight days later, on 10 November starting at 9pm, and that was the first time I saw the film. The channel’s viewer-access programme Right to Reply the following Saturday (which I also watched) was filled with complaints about the film’s violence (though neither scene goes further than what was often shown then to adult audiences) and in particular its language. There certainly is a fair amount of strong language in the film – so if offended by this, stay away – but as Hugh Stoddart points out in his interview on this disc, it’s a selection, heightening and emphasis, and certainly less sweary than real sailors would have been. Some of the earliest examples of undeleted expletives on television were justified by their being based on true events where the language was on the record – for example, a 1980 adaptation of the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sometimes cited erroneously as the first use of “fuck” and/or “cunt” in a scripted drama on the BBC. But in a film like Remembrance it’s justified (if it still needs to be, as the age above which people are more likely than not to be grossly offended by profanity is now very elderly) simply on the grounds of realism. If you look at a 1979 Play for Today like Peter McDougall’s Just a Boys’ Game (which the BFI have released in their second Play for Today Blu-ray box set), the story of Scottish hard men, it’s an inevitable flaw that McDougall was unable to include the language which his characters would undoubtedly have used in abundance.

Certainly the Taormina Film Festival in 1982 had no qualms about Remembrance’s cinematic status, as it gave the film its Best Film award, the Golden Charybdis. The UK cinema release in June 1982 was fairly limited and not especially successful, despite generally good reviews – see Colin Gregg’s interview on this disc for more about that. After its first Channel 4 showing the same year, it had a second as part of a Film on Four – Take 2 run on 18 July 1985 (at the later time of 9.30pm) and after that sunk into obscurity. Sadly that was the fate of many Films on Four, with several remaining AWOL as I write this,  many of which I saw at the time. There was no homevideo release for Remembrance until the present Blu-ray and a 2018 showing on Film Four, of reputedly a rather worse-for-wear copy, alerted many to its existence and merit. Now we have this Blu-ray, remastered from the original negative.

Remembrance is released on Blu-ray as Flipside number 48 by the BFI. The disc is encoded for Region B only. Remembrance had a AA certificate (fourteen and over) on its original cinema release and is now a 15. I will note that that the film runs 110:53 in this version, while the BBFC’s site gives a running time of 117:07, which is backed up by the review in the July 1982 Monthly Film Bulletin. This discrepancy is too large to be explained by differing idents (there would have been one for the cinema distributor Mainline Pictures on 35mm prints) so I note this for the record, but given the involvement of the director and screenwriter of the film on this release, there’s no reason to doubt that this is the approved version of the film.

The film was shot in Super 16mm colour (blown up to 35mm for cinema showings). This Blu-ray transfer is derived from a 2K remaster from the original negatives and is in the ratio of 1.66:1, which is the native aspect ratio of Super 16mm. (Colin Gregg in his interview says that the film was shot in 1.66:1 with a view to showing as wide as 1.85:1 – it’s quite likely that the few cinemas which showed the film would have shown it in the latter or 1.75:1, though as I didn’t see it there I can’t confirm that. With digital projection, 1.66:1 is of course as viable a projection ratio as any other.) Given the sub-35mm origins, the film is a little soft and certainly grainy, intensely so in some scenes, but that’s as it should be.

The soundtrack is LPCM 2.0, and plays in surround, noticeable right at the start with rainfall in your rear speakers, and also with much of the diegetic music on the soundtrack. (There’s very little non-diegetic music, other than a few instrumentals over the circus flashback scenes and the end credits.) This raises a question, as there’s no Dolby Stereo credit on this film, so this could be a remix from original mono. While Remembrance undoubtedly could have played in stereo in cinemas, stereophonic sound did not exist on television in 1982, apart from the occasional TV/radio simulcasts of usually highbrow music-based items such as Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute. Hard-of-hearing subtitles are available for this English-language film, and they are accurate, a few typos apart – “absteemious” for “abstemious”, “Totness” for “Totnes” and an oddly Americanised “asshole” for “arsehole”, for example. The subtitle track also has the benefit of identifying many of the music tracks we hear, as there’s no listing in the end credits. As for the sound mix itself, it’s clear and well-balanced, and the dialogue can be heard without much difficulty, with not much in the way of heavy accents.

Introduction by Gary Oldman (2:36)
This brief piece made for Film 4’s 2018 screening comes up as an option if you select Play Film. Oldman looks back fondly at Remembrance, which marked his debut on any size screen at the age of twenty-three. He was working extensively in repertory theatre at the time, so had to return from a day’s shooting to whichever of the four plays he was to act in that evening, with his lines in all of them memorised. Needless to say, he couldn’t keep up a schedule like that now.

Vivid Memories: interview with Colin Gregg (21:14)
Producer and director Gregg begins by talking about his career up to the point where he and his production company made Remembrance. A filmmaker from the age of ten, he found it difficult to establish himself professionally. At the time there wasn’t much of a British film industry to speak of, and television was difficult to break into. The BBC was heavily Oxbridge-biased and ITV was unionised. Based in the West Country at the time, he established himself by making documentaries, which is how he met Hugh Stoddart. He talks about his experiences of filming on Union Street, which frankly sound hair-raising. He made use of real people on screen, giving the example of the hotel receptionist where Douglas and his wife check in. He is rueful about Remembrance’s lack of success in the cinema, which was admittedly something of a dry run for Film on Four’s initial batch of film/television hybrids. In this case, the warm weather and the outbreak of the Falklands War acted as disincentives for many audiences, though critical notices were good. He does, as he always does, think of ways he might have made the film differently nowadays.

Working Away: interview with Hugh Stoddart (21:25)
Screenwriter Stoddart talks about how the filmmaking landscape in the UK changed with the arrival of Channel 4. In his research for Remembrance, he found how Union Street was very much a part of offshore culture for the Navy in Plymouth, and somewhere scores could be settled by means of fights when they couldn’t be on board ship, or not without serious disciplinary sanctions anyway. The street was a very different place during the day, as Stoddart found out personally: he went to a cinema there in the afternoon when the street was all but deserted and when he emerged in the evening it was in full uproar. He’s proud of his script, which weaves four stories around a character (Daniel) who is at the centre of the film despite being largely absent and mostly comatose when he is on screen. Stoddart answers criticisms about the film’s realism, with comments that the sailors are more articulate than they would be in reality. A realistic rendering of the sailors’ speech would be wall-to-wall profanity, and very tedious. He cites Robert Towne’s script for The Last Detail, a film considered unusually sweary for its time (1973), now long since surpassed, but one where the language illuminates character, an impotent response to lives trapped in the naval machine, and not tiresome as a result. It’s well-written strong (not “bad”) language, and the same is true of Remembrance. Stoddart does wince at the casual sexism of much of the dialogue, but that was undoubtedly true to life.

Acting the Part: interview with John Altman (12:58)
John Altman had made a few films before he was cast in Remembrance. His debut was in The First Great Train Robbery, where he shared a scene with Donald Sutherland, and he was also in The Birth of a Beatles as George Harrison, plus bits in Quadrophenia (uncredited) and An American Werewolf in London. Born in 1952, he claimed to be about nine years younger than he was when auditioning for Remembrance, and was ribbed mercilessly when the truth came to light. He speaks warmly of Colin Gregg, who was an empathic presence on set and not prone to shouting at actors as other directors might have been. He is particularly proud of the party scene in the second half of the film, which gave him the chance to deliver a monologue.

David Rose in Conversation (10:37)
Recorded in 2010 at the BFI Southbank, prior to his receiving a BFI Fellowship, Channel 4’s Senior Commissioning Editor is interviewed by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, and these are extracts from their conversation. He began at the BBC, setting up a drama department at Pebble Mill in Birmingham, exhorted by Sir Huw Wheldon to find new voices from the region. That he did, and he was approached by Isaacs as Channel 4 was being set up, precisely to make low-budget films (budget around £300,000 or less) which would be shown on the channel with a view to a cinema release beforehand. He made twenty in his first year (136 in his entire time at the channel), and Film Four also invested money in world cinema from directors such as Wim Wenders, Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. Rose says that he was flexible as he had a staff of just two others, and his main criteria in deciding what to invest in was if he wanted to keep turning the pages. Isaacs addresses the frequent comments that Films on Four were “not cinema”, citing a cartoon by the late Alan Parker, who gets a “sod you” from Sir Jeremy. Rose, then eighty-five is certainly sharp if clearly physically somewhat frail. He died in 2017 at the age of ninety-two and this item is dedicated to his memory.

Raleigh: The First Few Weeks (18:38)
A short documentary made in 1986 on video by the Central Office of Information, this is a piece showing the lives of young naval ratings at the training establishment HMS Raleigh, from first arrival to the passing-out parade. Aimed as a recruiting tool, it makes clear that the navy isn’t an easy life, and specifies the length of time the young men are signing up for. Items such as knives should be handed in before the course starts and booze and pornography (soft or hard) are not permitted. We see uniforms being ironed, assault courses being run, and the ratings being instructed in the use of rifles. A sign of the time is that homosexuality is strictly forbidden, on pain of dismissal, a law that was not changed until 2000.

Royal Navy Amazon (0:40)
You too can join the navy, which is the message of this recruitment ad from circa 1980. A montage of scenes aboard ship is set to then-current synth music, before the voiceover kicks in. Long before websites and QR codes, anyone interested is directed to their newspaper of choice (tabloid mostly) for an application form.

Galleries
There are two, not self-navigating. First are 115 pages of an early handwritten draft of Hugh Stoddart’s screenplay. Secondly, over thirty-two pages, is a selection of other material: a press clipping of a production announcement in Television Today, some newspaper reviews, letters of congratulation from David Puttnam and David Rose, a couple of admats for the London cinema release, a brochure for the initial batch of Films on Four (some of them still with currency, some perhaps deserving rescuing from obscurity) and a call sheet.

Booklet
The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release only, runs to thirty-two pages. It begins with a warning of possible plot spoilers, Hugh Stoddart begins with his words on his own film. In the late 1970s he was living in Devon, not far from Plymouth, and the behaviour of young sailors on shore leave in and around Union Street can well be imagined. He had naval connections, with an older brother serving and poor eyesight ruling himself out from doing likewise. He does acknowledge that none of his characters were black, which was something he wanted to include but was overruled. He did win the battle to keep the title Remembrance, though. Stoddart acknowledges that the film was seen as a picture of Britain as it was then: in recession, with high unemployment making the armed forces an attractive career option. The Navy did not cooperate with the filming, though, and Buckingham Palace asked to see it, though their reaction was not on record.

Next up is “‘Bloody Navy, Bloody Union Street’” by Johnny Mains, a Plymouth resident. This begins with a potted history of the city, including its wartime devastation and post-War rebuilding. It then continues with Gregg and Stoddart’s original inspiration for the film and their career up to this point. Remembrance was turned down by the National Film Development Fund after giving Stoddart a grant to write the screenplay and before Channel 4 came along. The film was originally accepted if Gregg and Stoddart could find co-production money, but when that fell through the channel funded the film fully – a budget of £325,000 according to Gregg. Many of the younger cast, male and female both, came from the Anna Scher Children’s Theatre in London. Mains does give more details of the film’s production than is available on the disc, especially in the absence of a commentary, which is one reason why you should buy the first pressing of this release if you can. Mains has clearly interviewed several participants including members of the cast including at least one uncredited extra.

Dr Josephine Botting follows with “Channeling Reality: The Legacy of Film on Four”. She begins by describing how the cinema saw television as a threat in the 1950s, but given time and the smaller screen then achieving higher audiences, some movement in the other direction, with television investment in cinema films. ZDF in West Germany and RAI in Italy were pioneers in this, and then in the UK came Channel 4. Botting talks about how, as a teenager, she tuned in regularly and names some of the films she was particularly taken by. (I did too, also a teenager, for the first couple of years before going to University.) Several of the films, like Remembrance, had festival exposure and awards success, and others did have cinema releases, usually before the TV screening but sometimes after (a “First Love” double bill of P’tang Yang Kipperbang and Those Glory, Glory Days, for example). The films ranged from quirky comedy to political comment, displaying a range similar to that of the BBC’s Play for Today, which ran from 1970 to 1984. 136 films were commissioned between 1982 and 1991, with the channel providing a fraction of the funding or sometimes all of it, but sadly as I mention above, much of it is hard to find and overdue for rediscovery.

After a cast and crew listing, the booklet includes notes on and credits for the extras, as well as plenty of stills.

Rescued from the limbo that holds rather too many Films on Four of the 1980s and 1990s, which is the raison d’être of the entire BFI Flipside range regardless of the films’ origins, Remembrance stands up very well nowadays. It’s undoubtedly a capsule of its time and place, of a Britain under new management and (with hindsight) about to go to war but it’s also a showcase for some up and coming acting talent. It’s well presented on this Blu-ray.