Eccleston has also turned down roles that he feels patronise working-class people. He’s described his own supportive parents – his father Ronnie was a forklift truck driver and his mother Elsie a cleaner – as his “biggest break”, and tells me he’s “tired of seeing working-class parents portrayed as being vehemently against their kids going into the arts. What was that f***ing ballet film everyone went mad for?” Billy Elliot? “Yeah! I was offered a meeting to play the father. But I said I’m not going to do that, it’s offensive. It was a middle-class view of the working-class experience, made for the American market. F*** it!”
Way back in 2006 I wrote a post on this blog with the clickbait title The ten most overrated films.
And one of those films was Billy Elliot, about which I said:
Worst of all it patronised the working class. When newspapers set out to find "real Billy Elliots", they found several and each had received tremendous support from his family.
Me and the Doctor, we see eye to eye.
I'm wondering whether either you or Eccleston actually watched it to the end, Jonathan. In the event Billy's dad undergoes something of an epiphany and becomes incredibly supportive of his son's ambitions. Even the angry older brother mellows a bit.
ReplyDeleteI certainly watched it to the end, but what I recall of that is the father gazing with childlike wonder at the sights of London. We didn't get any character development: just nasty dad and then nice dad.
ReplyDeleteOne of the "real Billy Elliots" the press found was going to have his fees at the Royal Ballet School paid by his grandfathers, who were both miners. In the event, he won a scholarship and they didn't have to.