The Old Oak is the name of a pub which also serves as the title of Ken Loach’s latest film. And as the director’s final feature, it’s a good reference to him as well – unwavering, deeply rooted and long a part of the English landscape.
After I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You, the movie completes a trilogy all set in contemporary northeast England.
Like those films, The Old Oak (read the review here) could not be made by anyone else but British cinema’s greatest proponent of social realism. It paints a bleak picture of abandoned people in an abandoned region – one where life in a former mining village is centred on the titular last pub standing. The village reaches a flashpoint when the authorities send Syrian refugees to live in the town’s worthless crumbling houses, one traumatised group living alongside locals who mostly resent their arrival into their impoverished streets.
But unlike its two predecessors, The Old Oak has a happy, hopeful ending. In fact – spoiler alert – it ends with a parade. Loach filmed the finale against the annual Durham Miners’ Gala, which last year attracted 200,000 people to the cathedral city. It might seem fitting that the final reel of Loach’s career involves some union banner waving. Given his near-30 feature films and decades of television drama before that, he possibly deserves a brass band in his send-off.
Speaking from his home in Bath, the affable Loach is quick to pounce when the Listener clumsily uses “trooping the colour” in a question about the procession.
“That’s the royalist word. It’s a parade of trade union strength.” There’s a sigh when he says his production’s cameras were some of the few there, despite the size of the occasion. It might get reported locally but not nationally. Even the Labour leadership avoids it.
“When there’s a good Labour leader they go. When there’s a right-wing Labour leader, they tend not to go because they know they’re going to get booed. But it’s a massive display of organised working-class strength.”
Loach turned 87 this year. He spent his 86th birthday shooting scenes at Durham Cathedral, where the Old Oak’s publican TJ has taken Syrian new arrival Yara for a visit. Casting the film, using mainly local amateur actors and Syrian migrants, took six months – Ebla Mari, who plays Yara, is from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Dave Turner, who plays TJ, is a former local firefighter and union man.
The whole project took 21/2 years, including a year away from home, though the shoot itself was just six weeks. Loach won’t make that commitment again, especially with his failing eyesight and declining short-term memory.
“I mean, I’ve been married to Lesley for over 60 years and when you get to that age, and you’re away for long periods, it’s a bit hard, really. Just maintaining the concentration 12 hours a day is quite a task. So, realistically, I can’t see myself getting around the course again.”
Asked what films stand out for him most, Loach says they are possibly the ones he’s best remembered for – Kes from 1969; Riff-Raff, Ladybird Ladybird, Raining Stones, Land and Freedom from his prodigious 1990s; his Cannes-winners: The Wind that Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake. “But they’re all like your kids – it’s a cliché, but the ones you tend to cherish the most are the ones that people didn’t notice so much.”
Paul Laverty, the writer of The Old Oak and many Loach films in the past 30 years, has said he admires the director’s perseverance in completing the unplanned trilogy. “On occasions as he got back to the hotel at 11pm, I did fear this punishing schedule, which would challenge a youngster in their 30s, would be too much. I am convinced his political conviction got him through.”
Loach has certainly stuck to his guns throughout, in his work and in his former membership of the UK Labour Party. He was expelled in 2021 by Keir Starmer in a purge of factions who had supported former leader Jeremy Corbyn. He had previously quit the party in the 1990s because of Tony Blair.
Holding his particular line hasn’t been difficult, he says. He arrived at the BBC drama department in the 1960s after his RAF National Service and university studies. There, the “writer was king” in an era of political upheaval and the rise of the new European cinema.
“So, within two or three years, I was catapulted from a political hothouse into making feature films. It was extraordinary luck.
“When you’ve absorbed the principles and then you see them played out, what choice do you have? The politics determines what stories you tell … but the actual film-making is much more instinctive. It’s to do with images and people you find and the texture of people’s skin and the interaction of people. When you’re working, the politics is the hinterland, well below the surface that you stand on.”
The Old Oak is in cinemas now.
