I watched the recently-released DVD of The History Boys the other night. I know the film has hadn’t had the best of reviews, but I was interested to compare it with the (much-praised) stage version I saw a month or two ago. (In the interests of internet propriety, I better state there is a spoiler further down!)

I was also interested because the play has a personal resonance for me. Written by Alan Bennett, it is about a group of sixth formers at a northern all-boys grammar school studying for their Oxford/Cambridge Common Entrance in Modern History. That’s precisely what I did back in 1993/4 – except I was in south Manchester rather than Sheffield – so it’s always interesting to see how fiction compares to your own experience.

Whilst I enjoyed both film and stage versions, I felt the film version lacked the very real sense of time and place the stage version had. The play is meant to be set in 1984 in Sheffield – the year the miners’ strike convulsed that part of Yorkshire. On stage, the back screen flashed continually shifting images of the battles of Orgreave coke works and the like. The film version, though, looked as though it could have occurred at any point in the last thirty years. Period details, enhancing the cracking script, would have made all the difference. Maybe they thought too many references to the goings-on of the day would confuse American audiences, but then so much of the play is based upon the niceties of the British class structure that I couldn’t see it appealing to very many Americans in the first place.

The other difference that annoyed me was the cop-out at the end. The most powerful part of the stage performance was when, after all the boys had won places at Oxford or Cambridge, there was a sort of time-travel experience, and the boys voiced what would happen to them twenty years hence. It was a moving comparison between what our youthful dreams are, and the realities a decade or two later. They had their own businesses, were lawyers, accountants, magistrates and the like. Only one, Posner, had ‘gone off the rails’ and descended into mental ill-health and suicide attempts – yet the film version dodged that, preferring instead a ‘cop out’ where he merely ‘drops out’. Was this another attempt to supply an American audience with a ‘happy ending’?

The acting was superb, but if I had to pick the best line-up, I would mix and match – I thought Steven Webb (who played the troubled, gay Posner on stage) was the stand out actor amongst the boys, capturing the fragility of the character much better than his film equivalent Samuel Barnett.

But perhaps what matters is not so much what occurs on screen or on the stage, but rather what you project of your own past on to what you are watching. Having travelled down the same academic path as the characters, experiencing the same worries, concerns, hopes, doubts and aspirations, it pulls you up sharp to consider what you have become compared to what you expected yourself to be – a realisation the characters force upon you in the production’s conclusion I mention above. I don’t mean this in any negative sense – it is not, in my case, a tale of failure – work in progress, perhaps? Perhaps it is more a case of realism triumphing over naïve enthusiasm?

The fact I see films and TV that moves me as this did – and shifts my views, as this didn’t – is a constant source of surprise to me. In many ways I like to think of myself as a realist, preferring to make decisions on the basis of fact rather than emotion. So why did Susan Sarandon’s appearance in Dead Man Walking turn me so strongly against the death penalty (not that I had ever really supported it anyway). Why did watching the BBC’s drama series on British troops in Bosnia, Warriors, have such an impact on me and my views on the conduct of foreign policy?

My favourite film is still Empire of the Sun – partly because of the quality of the filming and acting, but also because of the indomitable tenacity of the hero, Jim, who survives on his wits in Japanese civilian camps in the hinterland of Hong Kong during the War. I don’t cry over films, but the scene at the end where he is reunited with his parents after being separated from them for 4-5 years is the closest I have come. The returned children stand in a huddled mass in some neglected large glasshouse like Kew. Jim stands there vacant whilst the other children chatter, giggle and push each other round. His father bustles through the throng looking for Jim, bargeing past his son without even noticing him – it is his mother who spies him from afar, sees it is her much-changed son, and clasps him to her. Yet Jim does not say anything, or show any emotion. But in that silent, immobile moment, he expresses far more emotion than if he had erupted in joy. Instead, he now perceives reality. Always more shocking than any fantasy, dream … or ambition. Although on very different subject matters, it shares with The History Boys that ability to produce chilling moments where you see yourself rather than the characters.

This is meant to be a blog about my campaign for Blackpool North & Cleveleys, so you might well ask why I am indulging in stage reviews and film reminiscences and all the rest of it. Firstly, I think it important for those who seek public office to be honest about themselves. If I were only to post criticisms of the Government, or stories about potholes in Anchorsholme, you would have only a partial view of the individual who wants to represent you in Parliament. There is more to being a politician than politics. Indeed, I hate thinking of myself as a politician in the first place. I won’t be posting musings like this every day, but I may do occasionally. But then at least you get to see the ‘real’ me (whatever that means …)

But there is, I confess, a political angle to my review that I simply cannot resist, so stand by for the anti-government criticism. The play illuminates, in my view, a much wider debate ongoing at the moment concerning the admissions system for universities, and perhaps more widely, the overall purpose of our education system. It was ironic that one of the sub-plots the film version abandoned was that the play opens with the go-ahead ‘modern’ teacher having become a spin doctor in a Labour government – because therein lies one of the play’s most powerful points: education should be for its own sake, not merely for the box-tickers. Labour’s approach to education is the ghost at the banquet.

Few things have angered me more in recent weeks than the announcement that applicants to UCAS could (would?) now have to state on their forms whether their parents had or had not gone to university. In other words, to all intents and purposes, you had to declare your ‘class status’. If you didn’t, you risk losing out anyway. Stalinism? A fair charge. The Labour Party and its supporters shook with fury at the accusation – but let me quote to you from page 117 of Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick:

“A whole network of class-discriminatory legislation aimed at furthering the life-chances of proletarians and curtailing those of the bourgeois was put in place during the 1920s. Universities and technical schools practised ‘social selection’ (i.e. affirmative action) in admissions … If your father had been a noble or a kulak before the revolution, you shared that stigma, regardless of your own social position or political convictions”.

UCAS’ compliance with state theory is is an outrageous, misjudged and downright counter-productive step down the path towards socialised edu
cation. I first got involved in politics because the Labour Party were threatening to seize control of Trafford Council – where I went to school – and abolish the ‘11+’. My school was a Christian Brothers school, originally founded to help the children of Catholic Irish immigrants to join the ‘professional classes’. Many at the school were benefitting from the Assisted Places Scheme which Labour so detested, and abolished the moment it could. The vast majority of us – myself included – were the first in our families to go to university.

How dreadful it would be if the sons and daughters of my generation were to find it harder to go to university on account of our own aspiration some 15 years ago.

So where have all the meritocrats gone?