small screen Celluloid and sellability

Celluloid and sellability

The London Film Festival is the occasion for the annual wailing and gnashing of teeth about the state of the British film industry. Perhaps the lamentations will be less strident this year, with the news that the BBC is entering a record eight films into the festival. For TV stations, the BBC and C4 combined are doing pretty good impersonations of the entire British film industry at present. Highlights of the BBC contribution include: Streetlife (4 Nov), Karl Francis's bleak tale about a desperate mother reduced to murdering her baby; Saigon Baby (5 Nov), a script by Guy Hibbert (Nice Town) about the baby-trafficking business in the Far East, starring John Hurt (above); Stonewall (8 Nov), the late Nigel Finch's impassioned account of the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village; and Loving (12 Nov), Maggie Wadey's adaptation of the Henry Green novel about an affair between a butler (Mark Rylance) and a housemaid (Georgina Cates). These films may have been made by the BBC, but you don't have to watch them on a small screen.