Ann Barr and Peter York published The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in 1982 with the help of 50+ contributors as well as the editorial team at Harpers & Queen magazine. Part fashion ‘how-to’ and part parody, this tongue-in-cheek guide explored the habits and routines of young, upper-class Englishmen and women who “come up from the country” to live in London. Barr and York called this sect “Sloane Rangers” and crowned Princess Diana—the Handbook covergirl shown in an off-the-shoulder chiffon ball gown by Bellville Sassoon—their “Supersloane.” Her BC (“Before Charles”) wardrobe of ruffled shirts with ribbons at the neck, pastel vests, and Liberty prints promoted “the tenets of the noblesse oblige: virginity and marriage,” and was coveted and copied by “Carolines” (female Sloanes) everywhere.
The Royal Family—“the Palace”—set the tone for the Sloanes, but so did “the Past” and “the Country” as well as “the Army” and “the Status Quo.” A typical Caroline was expected to grow up in the country, go to finishing school, university (Oxford or Cambridge) or secretarial school, move to London, live with roommates, get married, and then move back to the country. It was a cyclical culture. She wore Loden coats in the winter and velvet blazers in the fall. Their values—God and the Queen—were not to be questioned, and fussy (foreign) things like French furniture and patisseries, rejected.
Sloanes were known for their speech. It is a specific, subtle, and secretive hallmark of their culture with verbal cues and conventions that are understood but never stated. For Sloanes, saying things in the ‘right’ way was of the utmost importance. “Received Pronunciation” or “BBC English” was paramount. Don’t say or think of the word “posh”—that’s considered nouveau riche.
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Almost no one in Mike Leigh’s made-for-television film Meantime (1983) sounds like a Sloane. No one idolizes the Queen or owns a waxed jacket. For the most part, everyone speaks in a thick East End accent scratched from years of cigarette smoke. Meantime takes place around the same time that The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published. In fact, Sloane Square, the playground of our titular Handbook protagonists, is not geographically far from Hackney and its E2 postcode where Meantime takes place—and yet they are worlds apart.
Meantime was made as a “Film on Four” by Central Television, aka Channel 4, and shot on 16mm. It was Leigh’s 13th feature-length film that evolved from his improvisational technique, but his 36th piece overall. The idea for Meantime came to Leigh while he was shooting the BBC TV film Home Sweet Home (1982) and sitting in the bath. According to Michael Coveney, Leigh was lounging and listening to the radio when “This story came about two unemployed kids living in Warrington or St. Helens or somewhere, who had committed suicide. And I thought… What we’re doing is irrelevant. That’s what we should be doing. Something about unemployment.”
Leigh’s film focuses on the Pollocks, a family living off the dole in the East End of London during the recession of the Thatcher administration. There is Mark (Phil Daniels), his brother Colin (Tim Roth), their parents Mavis (Pam Ferris) and Frank (Jeffrey Robert), as well as Mavis’s sister, Auntie Barbara (Marion Bailey) and her husband, Uncle John (Alfred Molina). There are a few outlying characters like Coxy (Gary Oldman), the Council Estates’ resident skinhead, and Hayley (Tilly Vosburgh), but almost everyone revolves around the Pollocks.
Every character in Meantime is unsentimental to the point of being borderline unlikeable. Mark is sarcastic and smart and almost always on the boil, Colin is essentially mute with a constant slack jaw, Mavis and Frank are uncaring and sour, and Auntie Barbara and Uncle John are judgmental with upturned noses. Everyone has their reasons for their behavior—the doldrums of unemployment serving as the primary ontological condition—but rather than providing us with admirable characters, Leigh shows us a group of people struggling to make life work on a personal, social, and realistic level.
The title of the film—Meantime—is quite literal and temporal. Everyone is trapped in the stagnancy of unemployment, so waiting—literally just sitting around—becomes the primary action of the film. Characters show up at the unemployment office for their benefits only to return to their recliners where they smoke cigarettes and watch television. Sometimes they go to the bingo hall or to the pub to play pool, but these sojourns feel like depressing field trips away from one gray location to another. Unlike other Mike Leigh joints such as Abigail’s Party (1977) or Life is Sweet (1990), where characters discuss their daily lives at length even if they are mundane, almost everyone in Meantime—with the exception of Mark and Auntie Barbara—is introverted to the point of being verbally stunted. Dialogue doesn’t really get us anywhere, so we often sit in silence with these characters, or in a chorus of “piss off”s during an argument.
The Pollocks embody a family that is shrouded by both political and social neglect due to their working class status within the Thatcher stratosphere of influence, so much so that to an untrained eye, they could be considered useless. That’s a ridiculous idea, of course, but Meantime is devoid of catharsis in the traditional sense of the word, especially within the landscape of conventional narrative cinema. The film lacks leading dialogue and action, and instead reflects the grayscale of unemployment with its blunted narrative shape and direction; Sean O’Sullivan considers the film “plotless.” Unlike a British heritage film, Leigh avoids formulaic beats and the false Hollywood moment. Plot is not the motor; characters work as our North Star. But these are guarded. How do we get into their heads if they don’t talk?
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In “Dress and Identity,” Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher define “dressing” as an “assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body.” It’s an umbrella term with several categories. Clothing obviously fits into this framework, but so do tattoos, coiffed hairstyles, rhinoplasties, and even voice modifications. Dressing plays a significant role in establishing the status and identity of the wearer. It’s affected by cultural, social, and economic elements. Dressing affects our reputation as well, they explain, because our clothes and body modifications send signals to our peers and strangers. These adornments project the specific self-image we want to display.
In Meantime, dressing is similar to masking. It communicates an identity and social standing for the characters that the plot lacks. It’s fluid, like Leigh’s “method,” where actors research real people and then develop them through improvisations and lengthy rehearsals. Lindy Hemming, the costume designer of Meantime, made sure that every cast member had the right clothes and props if needed. Before filming began, she and Leigh met at skinhead bars in East London for research, ensuring that Coxy’s outfits were as authentic as possible. Hemming’s lived-in costume designs combined with Roach-Higgins and Eicher’s definition of “dressing” can help us understand this “plotless” film and its guarded characters.
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Auntie Barbara is our gateway. She quickly establishes herself as a wannabe Caroline. During an early family get-together, Auntie Barbara chastises her sister Mavis for trying to use her “special morning coffee tray” for tea in her suburban home in Chigwell. Like her manicured and sterile home, appearances and decorum are everything for Auntie Barbara, but even she can’t maintain her composure around her extended family with their muddy shoes and rude behavior. Her voice, which is usually Sloane-like, becomes shrill. Auntie Barbara and Uncle John are not upper class—their true aspiration—but they are upwardly mobile, unlike the unemployed Pollocks. They probably voted for Thatcher. They don’t live in the country, but suburban Chigwell is a huge step up from the East End. The park is within walking distance.
Auntie Barbara’s pastel yellow sweater combo masks but also highlights her age. Her hair is coiffed and fashionable, while Mavis’s hair is tied up in a 1970s working-class bun. It’s out of her face, good for work, but also out of date. The yellow stripes of Auntie Barbara’s jumper cover a ruffled blouse that is tied together with a ribbon around the neck. It’s reminiscent of Princess Diana’s demure BC looks, specifically her red Muir and Osborn sheep jumper that she wore to a polo match in June 1983, but Auntie Barbara is in her late 30s unlike the People’s Princess, who was 22 at the time. Through dressing, it’s revealed that something is amiss. She’s either stuck in a state of arrested development, or she’s playing a part and not quite nailing the details.
Unlike Mavis, who works—and basically everyone else in the film, who is otherwise unemployed—Auntie Barbara has the privilege of not working; she’s a housewife. This is why she shows up unannounced to her sister’s flat in a gray argyle sweater, silk pink scarf, lavender trousers, and white lambswool coat. Conservative as ever, Auntie Barbara sticks out like a sore thumb in the Pollock’s cigarette-stained Council flat and offers Colin a fake job, helping her around the house. She sits like a pretty little crocus until the twinkly-eyed Estate Manager (Peter Wight) shows up to fix a broken window and messes with her facade. Their conversation evolves into a mild flirtation while the Pollocks fade into the background.
Auntie Barbara reveals that she took a secretarial course (Sloane approved) in college, but her real passion was economics (not Sloane approved). The Estate Manager, a hippie-wannabe who doesn’t like chairs, thinks he’s clocked her while sitting on the floor: “Ah, economics. The study of money…power.” Rather than sitting quietly like a good Sloane, Auntie Barbara bares her teeth and reads him to filth. Carolines are not supposed to be smart, but Auntie Barbara backs the Estate Manager into a corner when he says he doesn’t need money for anything, even food. Calling bullshit, Auntie Barbara retorts “You don’t grow your own food.” Gagged, the Estate Manager musters “I will.” We all know he won’t.
The only person who challenges Auntie Barbara’s need for domination is Mark. During a verbal spar that again hinges on flirtation, Auntie Barbara sits at her kitchen counter in a pastel striped blouse and orange sorbet-colored headscarf. Mark hits her with a knockout that ultimately dismantles her demure composure. “Do you know who you remind me of? … Princess Anne.” It’s the ultimate Sloane compliment, to be compared to anyone from the Palace, and at first Auntie Barbara is pleased, “What, do you think I look like her?” she says with a coquettish smile. But Mark is not the sort of character to provide salvation or give compliments. Knowing he’s got her by the neck, he acknowledges their physical similarities, but quickly hands her a coup de grâce: “You sound like her.”
For the first time, Auntie Barbara has been clocked. The voice is an integral component of upper class dressing, and Auntie Barbara is acting it out. She took “elocution lessons” in college in order to correct her Cockney accent. That’s where the dream began. To rise up from working East End circumstances unlike Mavis. The problem with marrying up and becoming a wannabe Caroline is that she’s smart. She doesn’t really want to be a complacent Caroline. She’d rather be working in a bank like her husband than sitting at home, rearranging her living room. That’s why she spars with young men. That’s why she resents her husband. She thinks she’s being a helpful member of society by offering Colin a fake job, but she’s actually patronizing. Auntie Barbara is not a symbol of upwardly mobile complacency, but rather an anguished woman, alienated from her family thanks to carefully constructed dressing, and hindered by the glass ceiling.
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While Auntie Barbara hides her contempt behind a manicured facade, Coxy wants his anguish to be known. He’s all about appearances. He dresses in typical skinhead attire. He wears red knee-high Doc Martens, acid wash jeans, bomber jackets, and suspenders, signaling that he is not to be messed with. Unlike the Pollocks, we never see where Coxy lives within the Council Estate. He roams around outside, drinking beer, harassing anyone who listens. Colin is often his punching bag. He puts Colin down in front of his crush, Hayley, to make himself seem larger. Coxy relies on intimidation rather than physical violence.
Coxy is the definition of all bark, no bite. He often speaks in gibberish, saying things like “You’re thick, I’m ‘ard” to Mark, but he can land the occasional insult. While waiting for the elevators with Colin, Coxy instigates a fight with a Jamaican man (Hepburn Graham) by saying “I’m all white, are you all white?” Colin watches sheepishly as Coxy digs himself further into the ground with racial slurs and hissing until fists are thrown. The Jamaican man knocks Coxy’s beanie off with a slap to the back of the head, rendering the now exposed skinhead mute. Without his uniform, Coxy has no substance. Standing in the elevator, the camera lingers over Coxy’s face, he’s bewildered that someone wouldn’t take his threats seriously.
The original skinheads of the 1960s were derivatives of the Mods. The latter were known for being stylish, upwardly mobile, and dedicated to cultivating the right look: parkas, tailor-made suits, Chelsea boots, etc. They worshiped soul music from the United States and detested the traditions and factory-working lifestyle of their parents. Eventually, a split occurred between working-class Mods and their upper-class contemporaries. As a result, the working class ‘hard Mods’ cut their hair and started wearing boots and listening to Afro-Caribbean music. They were influenced by ‘rude boys’ from Jamaica, and would become known as the first wave of skinheads.
Music is what bound all of these subcultures together, but soon there was a schism between first and second wave skinhead culture. The latter wave wanted to match—if not overpower—the shock value of punks, another similarly-suited subculture on the rise, leading the second generation of skinheads to new extremes. Clothing became excessively masculine. Boots became taller, military surplus jackets replaced suits, and hair became shorter to the point of being bald. Coxy wears this uniform to a T throughout Meantime. This style was seen as a form of resistance against the ‘coming man’ of the late 1960s—i.e., hippies with long hair during the first wave, and immigrants in the second, specifically the Windrush generation, hence the incident in the elevator with Coxy and the Jamaican man. Long gone were the days of music bringing everyone together.
While second-wave skinheads are largely understood as an assertion of white working class resentment by the 1980s, Coxy is neither influential nor redeemable. This is an intentional decision on Leigh’s part. The last time we see Coxy, he’s banging around in a metal pot “like one of Beckett’s doomed dustbin dwellers in Leigh’s beloved Endgame” according to Michael Coveney. Coxy is not a main character despite his precise dressing. He lives in the peripheries of the Meantime, functioning as a cautionary tale, his racist ideations rendered futile by Leigh’s imagination.
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The only person who pays Coxy any mind is Colin. They have what appears to be a symbiotic relationship, but not really. Colin is a loner, who mirrors Coxy’s outdoor movement from time to time, drifting from one gray location to the next. Everyone in Meantime is suffocated by the weight of unemployment, but Colin is hit the hardest. Sam Bodrojan writes that “Tim Roth sinks into his parents’ couch, he looks physically weighed down by the economic shambles of his country; he’s young, but he sits like his knees hurt.”
Colin’s dressing reflects this idea. His spectacles are crooked and held together by tape, and his trousers are too short, with holes in the crotch. His jaw is often slack. He sometimes wears three sweaters at a time, as if he’s unsure of the weather. Unlike Mark, who looks sharp in leather jackets and turtlenecks, Colin’s clothes seem a size too small. He’s not capable of buying his own clothes, a fact Mavis resents, so almost everything he wears looks like a hand-me-down. His appearance—like his presence—is an afterthought. Colin wants to keep up, but he often misses the larger picture. At one point during the film, Mavis’s washing machine breaks. The camera shoots the scene from the waist down, almost as if it’s too embarrassing to see anyone’s face during this moment of frustration. The Pollocks don’t own the machine or really anything in their flat besides their recliners, and Colin’s solution is to “get a new one,” pissing his mother off to no end.
Colin’s comment to Mavis may read as either flippant or oblivious, depending on how you want to look at it, but they serve as a Rosetta Stone for his character. Because Colin seeks an identity, Coxy’s Doc Martens offer the youngest Pollock a solution. During one of their random hang outs, as Coxy drags Colin from one location to the next, the skinhead offers Colin a rare olive branch: “You’re my mate.” For the first time, Colin’s face lights up. Coxy’s generosity quickly dwindles, and he makes fun of Colin’s out-of-date Modish parka, and tells him he needs a pair of Docs. Because Colin is “not too bright” (as Leigh puts it), having the right bomber jacket or a pair of red boots ensures friendship and, to a certain extent, girls. Docs function like a new washing machine. In Colin’s mind, material objects are the key to an easier life. Colin thinks this is why Coxy is able to get Hayley’s attention, something he envies, but of course it doesn’t register to Colin that the attention is largely unwanted. Hayley is afraid of Coxy; she shudders when she’s around him. He doesn’t understand that Coxy’s look has racist overtones or that he’s a bully.
The problem is Colin doesn’t have 20 quid for a pair of Docs. This is why Colin takes the fake job helping Auntie Barbara around the house. On his first day, Colin arrives lost and late. As Auntie Barbara and Mark drive around looking for him, Roger Pratt, the film’s cinematographer, captures Colin standing next to a statue of Winston Churchill. It’s the first time we see outside of the housing block. Unlike the former Prime Minister, who stands proud and bronzed in his three-piece suit, Colin appears frazzled in his winter parka and high-water jeans. These are his best clothes, but Auntie Barbara quickly asks him to change so that he can “look smart … like me.” It’s an odd way to welcome someone into their home. Now, rather than sitting on his recliner at the Council Estate, Colin sinks further into his aunt’s couch without saying a word. His aunt tries to comfort him, but Colin is too stunned to speak. Unlike Mark, Colin doesn’t see the job as patronizing, but he’s fed up. In his mind, his brother has once again prevented him from living a better life, despite the fact that Mark confirms that he isn’t trying to steal his job because he has “principals,” something his aunt and parents lack.
Colin’s fatal flaw is that he’s myopic; he just wants a pair of boots. Everything boils down to that. After losing his ‘job,’ being rejected by Haley, and finding Coxy in that steel drum, Colin takes matters into his own hands: he shaves his head. Realizing his mistake, he hides this modification from everyone except Mark. Colin is obviously not a skinhead; he’s nothing like Coxy, but he is confused. His desire to dress like Coxy symbolizes an absence in Colin’s life. Like so many other unemployed people in the UK at this time, Colin is unnurtured, forgotten, and ultimately left to his own devices—but in true Mike Leigh fashion, the director doesn’t leave the youngest Pollock hanging. Colin has Mark as a lifeline. He defends his brother from his parents and tells him he loves him, becoming a surrogate parent during Colin’s moment of need. Rather than calling Colin “Kermit” or “Muppet,” his usual insults of choice, Mark gives his brother a new nickname that gets a laugh from his younger sibling: “Kojak,” like the bald NYC detective. For the first time, Colin isn’t on his own. He’s not a burden. His hair will grow back.