Thirty Years On, ‘Brassed Off’ Still Hits the Right Note — and Its Writer Fears the Film Industry Has Lost the Plot

When Mark Herman sat down to write a film about a colliery brass band fighting to survive the death of Britain’s mining industry, he had modest ambitions. “I thought it might be popular within a 10 mile radius of Barnsley for about two weeks,” he recalls with a laugh. Thirty years later, Brassed Off is being celebrated with a live performance at the Royal Albert Hall, has a place in the BFI’s Top 100 British Films, and has just been named one of the Prime Minister’s favourite films of all time.

The film, released in 1996, follows the fictional Grimley Colliery Band as they prepare for Britain’s biggest brass band competition while their pit’s future hangs in the balance. Starring Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and a young Ewan McGregor, it is both a comedy and a quietly furious political statement about the human cost of the Thatcher government’s dismantling of the coal industry.

“I think the people who went expecting a political film got the bonus of a bit of comedy,” Herman says. “And the people who went expecting comedy got the bonus of the political message. Anybody who went got a sort of bonus they might not have expected.”

That balance is, he believes, why the film has refused to fade. Teenagers and twenty-somethings who weren’t alive when it was released still respond to it, he says, because its real subject isn’t a brass band in a made-up South Yorkshire town — it’s the experience of being downtrodden by forces beyond your control. “It’s still relevant and still plays,” he says.

The anniversary arrives with a neat piece of symmetry: Grimethorpe Colliery Band, the real-life ensemble that inspired the film and performed much of its music, will play live at the Royal Albert Hall alongside a special screening — bringing fiction back to the very venue where Grimley’s story reaches its climax.

It also arrives with an unexpected celebrity endorsement. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently named Brassed Off among his four favourite films, a choice Herman takes as something of a compliment. “How do I feel about that? It’s good! It’s very flattering, but I’d have been more surprised if he’d have chosen Notting Hill.”

Beneath the nostalgia, though, Herman is sounding a warning about the industry that made his film possible in the first place. Despite Brassed Off’s commercial and critical success — a film that started as what he calls “not an easy pitch” before word of mouth carried it through cinemas for months — he says he has spent the past decade struggling to get similar projects off the ground.

“It seems to be blockbusters or micro-budget at the moment and there’s no space for mid-budget British films like those, films like I want to make,” he says. “The studios are not as brave as they were. They’d stick their neck out, in what I call the old days. It was quite a risky film to make, Brassed Off, but now they seem to only want to put money behind dead certs.”

It’s a sobering assessment from a filmmaker whose biggest success was, by his own admission, a gamble nobody expected to pay off. Herman says he remains “fairly pessimistic” about the state of British cinema, even as he points to recent bright spots — citing I Swear, a biographical drama about a man living with severe Tourette syndrome, and The Ballad of Wallis Island, the offbeat comedy written by and starring Tim Key and Tom Basden, as among his favourite films of the past year. Both, notably, are the kind of modestly budgeted, character-driven British films he fears are becoming endangered.

For now, though, the anniversary is a chance to celebrate rather than mourn. Three decades after a small film about a struggling brass band found an audience far beyond the ten-mile radius of Barnsley its writer once imagined, Grimethorpe’s musicians will once again take to the stage at the Royal Albert Hall — proof, perhaps, that stories about ordinary people fighting to be heard never really go out of tune.