From the minute Made in Britain kicks off, with a 17-year-old Tim Roth with skinhead and a swastika tattoo between his eyebrows, slouching into the juvenile court to the strains of The Exploited, the energy never flags. Clarke's patented loping Steadicam follows Trevor (Roth) as he goes from assessment centre to job centre to sniffing glue with a fellow ne'er-do-well to stealing a car and throwing bricks through a Pakistani's front window, seemingly bent on pushing the system to its limits. Trevor doesn't give a f***, and in an amazing second act, set entirely in a basement room, he tells the authorities what he thinks of them: "I'm a star, mate. I'm in exactly the right place at the right time."
Trevor is hateful - he's racist, bullying, utterly selfish and dangerous, but he's also so bright and eloquent that the main feeling on watching the film is wonder at a society that could possible have produced people like this. David Leland, who wrote the film, speculated years later that Trevor would probably have gone on to work in the Stock Exchange in the late Eighties - he might well have been one of the well-heeled cronies of Gary Oldman's Bez in Clarke's 1988 football hooliganism film, The Firm. In the depressed and fearful Britain of 1982, Trevor's manic energy and contempt has no outlet - once Thatcherite policies had helped to boost the British economy, his disbelief in "society" would have been totally at home on the stock market. As Thatcher famously remarked, "There is no such thing as society", and Made in Britain shows how she caused such a state of affairs to come about.
It's also very funny, in a sick kind of way.
Trevor is hateful - he's racist, bullying, utterly selfish and dangerous, but he's also so bright and eloquent that the main feeling on watching the film is wonder at a society that could possible have produced people like this. David Leland, who wrote the film, speculated years later that Trevor would probably have gone on to work in the Stock Exchange in the late Eighties - he might well have been one of the well-heeled cronies of Gary Oldman's Bez in Clarke's 1988 football hooliganism film, The Firm. In the depressed and fearful Britain of 1982, Trevor's manic energy and contempt has no outlet - once Thatcherite policies had helped to boost the British economy, his disbelief in "society" would have been totally at home on the stock market. As Thatcher famously remarked, "There is no such thing as society", and Made in Britain shows how she caused such a state of affairs to come about.
It's also very funny, in a sick kind of way.