Directed by Roger Mitchell
Screenplay by Richard Bean & Chris Coleman
Music by George Fenton
2020 (Venice Film Festival)
Released February 2022. DVD from June 2022
CAST
Jim Broadbent- Kempton Bunton
Helen Mirren – Dorothy Bunton
Fionn Whitehead- Jackie Bunton
Anna Maxwell Martin – Mrs Gowling
Matthew Goode – Jeremy Hutchinson,. QC
Richard McCabe- Rab Butler
Heather Vraney- Debbie, clerk of the court
Jack Bandeira – Kenny Bunton
Joshua McGuire – Eric Crowther
Darren Charman – Duke of Wellington
We very much wanted to see this in the cinema but missed it. Then it was on Amazon at £15.49 to RENT for 48 hours. We kept checking. The price did not fall, so we said,’Sod it. we’ll wait for the DVD.’ Here it is, June 2022. A mere £10. It’s not the sort of film that demands a surround sound cinema (or indeed Blu-ray) after all. The cast is a major attraction … Broadbent and Mirren, but then you get cameos from some of our favourite stage actors … Richard McCabe, Joshua McGuire, Matthew Goode. You want to see more of all of them.
Richard Bean as co-writer is the greatest attraction though. One Man, Two Guv’nors and many other theatrical triumphs … see the links at the foot of the review.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY … groan. What percentage of films recently have been prefaced by this? I’m waiting for someone to replace it with IT’S ALL FICTION – WE MADE IT UP! But it is based on the true story of the theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in 1961. It was hidden in the Newcastle home of Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) who then tried to get free TV licences for the elderly as a ransom for returning it.
Kempton is a pig-headed one track mind sort of chap, who has become obsessed with TV licences. Bear with me, UK readers, but over half my readers here are non-UK based. TV licences fund the BBC – TV, radio, World Service. It’s an obligation to have one, and it means advertising-free TV which is independent of the likes of Murdoch and Fox News.I believe it’s a great British institution. It’s not cheap … currently it’s £159 a year, or £3 a week for the whole of a household regardless of how many TVs, computers and radios there are. I strongly approve of it as a method for financing TV and radio. Nowadays, it ‘s free for the over 75s who receive pension credit, and for the visually impaired. The fine for not having a licence is up to £1000.
In 1960, when the story starts, it was NOT free for the elderly, or for the housebound (it still isn’t for the housebound, and it should be). This is Kempton’s beef. In those days, we had constant announcements on TV and radio and local newspapers, warning of the perils of not having a licence and advising us that TV Detector vans were in our area.
These vans cruised the streets with a revolving antenna which we were told could pick up the radiation from a TV cathode ray tube for at least an hour after it was switched off. No use in watching out of the window for the van to come down your street. We never thought that if a cathode ray tube emitted that much radiation for that amount of time it was not great to be sitting directly in front of it.
A 1960 British TV set could only receive two channels … BBC, and the local ITV channel. Kempton removes the component which allows BBC and refuses to pay as he only watches ITV, which paid for itself through advertising. You’ll wonder were the yellow went when you clean your teeth with Pepsodent etc. He’s caught. ‘I don’t watch BBC’ was never accepted as a defence. It was pretty rigorous. I had an aunt who refused to have a TV in the house as she preferred to read (you could buy a radio only licence, which she had). She used to get furious about constant checks and the need to declare again and again that she had no TV set. It still happens to the “No TV” hold-outs. The default government setting is that you have a TV and you have to prove otherwise.
Kempton goes to prison for thirteen days. Let’s add that you’d have to be extremely recalcitrant to end up in jail. That would mean going to court, being fined, then refusing to pay the fine. It’s still real though … in 2017, nearly 185,000 people were charged with not having a TV licence and 90 were jailed for failing to pay the fines. Currently, the government is declining to imprison people for the offence.
So Kempton has a very large buzzing bee in his bonnet about TV licences. This is aggravated when he finds that the nation has just paid £140,000 to buy Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, victor at Waterloo and later British prime minister. You multiply by 24.5 to get a 2022 value … £3,430,000. (In fact, the Wolfson Foundation had paid £100,000 and the government topped it up by £40,000 to match an American bid).
He is incensed, believing the money could be used for free TV licences. He’s a stroppy bugger too – losing jobs as a taxi driver, then as a baker, for speaking his mind.
No plot spoilers from there. The painting is stolen just 19 days after going on display. It is ransomed. He ends up in court, which is the funniest part of the film (probably because of the cameos). He goes in for jokes and banter which I can’t believe he’d have got away with.
The interest is the “feel” of pre-Beatles England. The yellowing wallpaper, the tiny TVs, the dowdy clothes, the tobacco pipes, the cars on the street. The attitudes (especially Helen Mirren as Dorothy Bunton). You can almost smell the boiling cabbage from the kitchen. Jim is happiest in a jacket and tie (as was my father-in-law). There’s not a lot of music of the era, but Helen Shapiro’s Walking Back to Happiness stood out.
They use archive film clips to show London. They don’t colour match, nor obviously do they quality match- they get over that by using a collage on the screen which means you don’t see the grain of a single shot. I’ve done the same with images of LPs in galleries on the Around and Around site. Poor quality? Don’t show it full size.
The film received so many five star reviews.
The Goya portrait was painted directly after the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, from life. Goya touched it up with more medals and regalia in 1814. A line occurs twice, when Kempton looks at the painting:
It’s not that good, is it?
Kempton Bunton
For us that applied to the film. “Five stars” has to be seen in the context of other British films, such as the Dig or The Man With The Hat. It’s nowhere near that class. It’s a pleasant though somewhat bland ninety minutes. The standard is around that of a BBC Sunday night TV series, no better. Great cast, but that’s true of Sunday night BBC series (and they come free with the TV licence). I never felt gripped or involved.
***
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
RICHARD BEAN (writer)
Young Marx, Bridge Theatre
The Hypocrite, RSC 2017
One Man Two Guv’nors, 2012
Pitcairn, Chichester Minerva Theatre, 2014
The Hypochondriac, Bath Theatre Royal, 2014
JIM BROADBENT
A Very, Very Very Dark Matter by Martin McDonagh, Bridge Theatre 2018
The Iron Lady (FILM)
Another Year (FILM)
Peter Viney's Blog 
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