TwentyFourSeven

Shown: 19 February 2000

UK 1997
Directed by Shane Meadows
Leading players - Bob Hoskins, Frank Harper and Danny Nussbaum

Synopsis

The title is shorthand for working round the clock seven days a week. Alan Darcy (Bob Hoskins), a former soccer coach, attempts to give some meaning to the lives of a group of shiftless youths from a rundown housing estate in Nottingham by setting up a boxing club. The club is partly financed by the father of one of the youths, Ronnie Marsh (Frank Harper), a local gangster. For a while the youths find a sense of purpose and pride and a fight is arranged with members of a rival club. But the transformation does not last, and against the usual backgrounds of domestic strife, crime and drug abuse the tale draws to its inevitable end.

However, the film has many comic moments, much of the humour arising from the interplay between Darcy and Marsh, and the amusing dialogue.

The film is shot in black and white throughout, giving it a lyrical quality whilst emphasising the stark reality and hopelessness of the boys' lives.

Bob Hoskins gives a passionate performance as Darcy, revealing the vulnerability below his character's outwardly ebullient persona. In one of the best scenes in the film he takes his elderly aunt ballroom dancing which he quirkily describes as a "quilt to hide my loneliness".

This is the first full length feature from Shane Meadows, himself Nottingham-born and based. Over a period of two years, while on the dole, Meadows made over 200 short films, two of which - Small Time and Where's the Money, Ronnie? - have elicited comparisons with Ken Loach and Quentin Tarantino.

The film won European Film Award for Best Actor for Hoskins in 1997 and the Hickox Award for Shane Meadows at the 1998 British Independent Film Awards.