Ken Loach
Pro-Chancellor, distinguished friends, colleagues, graduands and guests.
Ken Loach is Britain's foremost political filmmaker and has a career spanning five decades. His work has drawn attention to some of the most poignant social issues including labour rights, mental health, unemployment and homelessness. He is well respected for his documentary style dramas and feature films which champion the underdog and reveal the hardships and struggles of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Local lad Ken, was born in 1936 in Nuneaton. The son of an electrician, he attended King Edward VI Grammar School and after two years of National Service studied Law at Oxford University, where he was President of the Dramatic Society.
After a brief spell in the theatre, Ken’s attention quickly turned to directing, joining Northampton Repertory Theatre as an assistant director in 1961 and then moving to the BBC as a trainee television director in 1963. This launched a long career directing films for television and the cinema, from Cathy Come Home and Kes in the sixties to Land And Freedom, Sweet Sixteen and The Wind That Shakes The Barley in recent years.
Ken became most well-known for directing a series of six ‘Wednesday Plays’. These plays caused controversy for tackling otherwise taboo subjects. ‘Up The Junction’ was the most groundbreaking for its inclusion of a controversial abortion sequence. This series also included ‘Cathy Come Home’ which established Ken's reputation for social-issue drama. Cathy Come Home exposed homelessness as a social problem which aroused national concern and gave a boost to homelessness charity Shelter which, coincidentally, launched a few days later.
It was through the ‘Wednesday Plays’ that Ken developed a naturalistic style which reached its fullest expression in his second feature film, Kes, released in 1969. Kes told the story of Billy Casper, a working-class lad from Barnsley, alienated from school and the prospect of working in the coal mine, who finds a sense of personal achievement in learning to train and fly a kestrel. Kes was a commercial and critical success.
The decline of the British film industry in the 1970s forced Ken to move back to television, making a series of radical political dramas, including ‘The Big Flame’, which dramatised a fictional strike at the Liverpool docks.
In the 1980s, Ken’s writing regularly ran into problems of political censorship. His four-part series about the trade unions, Questions Of Leadership, commissioned by Channel Four, was never shown; a film about the miners' strike for The South Bank Show was withheld by LWT, to be shown eventually on Channel Four.
The late 1980s and 1990s saw the production of a series of critically acclaimed films such as Hidden Agenda, one of the rare films dealing with the political troubles in Northern Ireland, Carla's Song set partially in Nicaragua, and Land and Freedom examining the Republican resistance in the Spanish Civil War. During this period, Ken was awarded prizes at the Cannes Film Festival on three occasions.
In 2006, he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes for his film ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’, a film about the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War during the 1920s. 2006 also saw Ken receive the BAFTA Fellowship and this year he was presented with the Honorary Golden Bear at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.
His most commercially successful recent film is Looking for Eric, featuring a depressed postman's conversations with the ex-Manchester United football star, Eric Cantona (played by Cantona himself). The film received critical acclaim and won the Magritte Award for Best Co-Production. A short film concerning Bath FC is part of the DVD issue of ‘Looking for Eric’, a topic close to Ken’s heart, as a shareholder and supporter of Bath City FC. Ken now lives in Bath with his wife Lesley. His son, Jim Loach has also become a television and film director.
Few directors have been as consistent in their themes and their filmic style, or as principled in their politics, as Ken Loach and we’re delighted that he has chosen to join us here in Coventry today. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the British Film Industry, Coventry University, by decision of the Academic Board, has the privilege of conferring the Degree of Doctor of Arts, honoris causa, on Ken Loach.