Billy Liar

Simon Heffer continues his highly-authored and deeply-informed exploration of British cinema by viewing five New Wave or so-called "Kitchen Sink" films of the late 1950s and 1960s.

5.Billy Liar

Keith Waterhouse's novel about Billy Fisher was turned into a film, starring Tom Courtenay, in 1963. The story of Billy's real life in a semi somewhere in the West Riding, and his vividly imagined alternative life in Ambrosia, lived to the accompaniment of a brass band, was unlike any film that had come before, but was it tragedy or comedy? Simon Heffer ends his account of the New Wave with this highly contentious film.

Producer: Beaty Rubens.