Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down

Two 16-year-old schoolgirls from a sink estate in Bradford find fun and happiness by shacking up with a middle-aged married man — if you’ve never seen it, it sounds like the worst movie ever made. Yet Rita, Sue and Bob Too was a delight, one of the best British films of the 1980s, and this month it’s being rereleased in a new restoration by the BFI.

I saw it when it first came out, in 1987, and fell head over heels in love with it. At last, here was a film about working-class life that wasn’t glum. Watching it again, 30 years on, it still feels just as fresh and funny, but the landscape it describes has changed. Billed as ‘Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down’, it now plays like a period piece — a picture of a starker, simpler world, where Bacardi was the drug of choice and sex was something that happened on the back seat of your brother’s Ford Cortina. Another thing that’s changed is that the woman who wrote it, Andrea Dunbar, is long since dead. Once you know her story, the film changes. It’s even more engrossing, but it doesn’t seem quite so amusing any more.

Andrea Dunbar was born in Bradford in 1961, one of eight children, and grew up on the Buttershaw estate, where Rita, Sue and Bob Too was filmed. She got pregnant at 15, gave birth to a stillborn baby, and wrote a play about it called The Arbor for her English CSE. Her teacher was so impressed that he sent it to Yorkshire TV, who turned it down (they said the language was unaccept-able). Dunbar left school at 16, had three children by three different men, and ended up in a refuge for battered women.