LIVING ON THE EDGE 1987

- TRAILER

Award-winning cinema/TV documentary film about the post-War dreams of British working people and their sense of betrayal in the Thatcher era, mixing newsreels, old films, advertisements, pop music and radio archives with present day actuality.

Thanks to director Mike Grigsby's status as a leading UK documentary filmmaker he and I were given carte blanche by Central TV to make a ‘state of the nation’ documentary about Thatcher’s Britain during its late 1980’s ‘boom’, and its little-seen dark side.

In a then unique initiative for a network documentary, and with the help of the British Film Institute, a 35 mm ‘blow-up’ of Living On The Edge was theatrically distributed on the art-house circuit. It later received its network broadcast on November 7th 1987.

I performed a similar role as I had on Living On The Edge on Grigsby's follow-up 'state of the nation' documentary The Time Of Our Lives (BBC Fine Cut, 1994).

Mike Grigsby died suddenly on March 12th 2013 - ‘One of the giants of British documentary filmmaking.’ (British Film Institute). The Guardian published an edited tribute to him by me on March 29th 2013. My unedited tribute can be found here.

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