On demand: "Meantime"

From the early days of the Mike Leigh Film Project, an often riotous comedy about deeply dissatisfied people. Fashioned (believe it or not) for Central Television, home of darts-based Sunday teatime favourite Bullseye, 1983's Meantime feels like Leigh's update of the old Tolstoy dictum that insisted each family is unhappy in their own way. It opens with a directorial feint: a check-in with upwardly mobile suburban couple Alfred Molina and Marion Bailey, caught doing up their two-bed semi as a means of filling what otherwise seems a terribly empty petit-bourgeois existence. Yet for the most part, we're embedded - bogged down may be the better phrase - with the couple's pungently named relatives the Pollocks: unemployed dad Jeff Robert, mum Pam Ferris trying to keep the household afloat on bingo winnings, and two late-teenage sons (perma-aggro Steve Wright-alike Phil Daniels and gormless mouthbreather Tim Roth), neither of whom forms the greatest argument for procreation. Even if you disagree vehemently, you can see how the argument Leigh doesn't much care for his characters came about. (One early exchange between Daniels and skinhead mate Gary Oldman goes as follows: "You're really thick, you are." "I ain't as thick as you." "No-one's as thick as me.") Yet as embodied by a forceful new generation and style of actors, these characters remain enormously fun to watch and listen to, drilled into sulky, sarky, slangy rhythms that suggested Leigh had kept his ears open during his years of apprenticeship, and was now attempting something as revolutionary in film acting as the Method had been thirty years before. You can still feel how thrilling Meantime must have been in 1983: no Merchant-Ivory, this, no Chariots of Fire. Adios stuffed shirts and stiff upper lips, hello thick ears and lashings of tongue and cheek.

If Leigh really loathed the Pollocks, he a) wouldn't have turned these 100 minutes over to them in the way he does, b) wouldn't so closely hang on their every spit and cough, and c) wouldn't so clearly be making a case that their wayward meanderings - linked in passing to the inertia then being fostered within the working classes by Thatcherism - merited the most attentive study. Meantime remains political only in passing: though Roth's Colin is unexpectedly, nay miraculously offered a chance to improve his lot (and blows it), practically everyone else on screen has nothing to do and little to hope for. So they bicker with and snipe at one another, the rumbling getting nasty whenever a character of colour walks on, though arguably no nastier than it would have been on the streets of the real Britain circa 1983. Leigh isn't interested in pointmaking or point-scoring, however, instead diligently observing who these people are and why they've turned out like this: petty, sad, bored, depressive or passive-aggressive. Rather than dismissing these grumps and muppets out of hand, the director demonstrates a commendable generosity of spirit in centralising small lives and spotting within them the potential for at least a narrow form of growth. It's loudly, even rudely British, bristling with familiar faces, locations (pissy towerblock lifts, concrete precincts overrun with plastic bags, Chigwell Tube station), insults ("he's a jammy bastard", "Kojak", "nosy bloody Parker", "oi, prat!"), ad jingles, and lines that come out of nowhere to summarise the British experience ("I just had a really horrible hamburger", "Of course I'm not sure"). Better still, Leigh was starting to develop a sly visual sense: the whole movie seems to exist just to showcase the image of an anoraked Roth shambling past a statue of Churchill, but also don't overlook the (frankly hilarious) late revelation that Oldman's prize dunderhead Coxy has somehow started a fight with himself in an overturned bin. The core of the Leigh filmography - dating back to 1971's Bleak Moments and passing through High Hopes and Life is Sweet to Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and points beyond - would be variations on the theme of daily drudgery. Some would be more engaging and successful than others, but Meantime now looks like the first time Leigh realised this technique could not only sustain a feature but prove wholly enveloping in its description of phrases, routines and textures. We ought to quote it just as often as people quote from Abigail's Party and Nuts in May.

Meantime is available on a Special Edition DVD through ITV Studios Home Entertainment, to stream via YouTube, and to rent via the BFI Player.