Purely Belter

[London Dave]

A film that may be of interest to the Joffas of this world is out here. Purely Belter is set in Toon Town and it's about two teenagers concocting various dodgy schemes to fund the purchase a pair of Newcy Utd season tickets. Only seen the shorts which looked alright (keeping in mind the old chinese proverb regarding shorts), but I'll no doubt see it eventually.

Might give you a few ideas for funding your 'pies season ticket Joffa!!!!!


Probably one for video release in Oz I would think!

[joffa#2001]

let us know more davo it sounds ok
if you come across any reviews post em on here mate and i will
run them of the ole printer.


umm regarding season tickets the joffa is rockin up to every game this season in a wheel chair,well it will work until we start bangin on them goals and then i guess i will be discovered.

oh well back to the drawing board.

[Greg J]

I found this on the NUFC site (I think). Some guy called Richard Kelly wrote. The film sounds good, the book even better.

"It's surely a mark of commercial self-assurance in British cinema when a comedy can seek its laughs in the antipathy between fans of Newcastle United ('Mags') and them lot that's from Sunderland ('Mackems') without fretting over what folk in Iowa will make of it.

Such is Purely Belter, adapted from The Season Ticket, a recently published novel by Gateshead schoolteacher Jonathan Tulloch. The title change is probably to assure punters that this is more than just another footie film, and one (probably) doesn't have to be a Mag to appreciate this canny tale, or its central pair of teenage Toon fans.

Director Mark Herman has been hailed in some quarters as a sort of cheerier, populist Ken Loach, and his model here might well be Kes. (Of course, Barry Hines was still teaching in Barnsley when he wrote A Kestrel for a Knave). But stylistically Purely Belter is twice removed from Loach's respectful naturalism, and planted squarely in the mode of 'heart-warming comedy'.

Herman shapes his sequences for maximum chuckles, with sign-posted interludes of poignancy. Still, the urchin-like Gerry sometimes recalls Billy Casper in Kes, if only when he's being browbeaten by sneering teacher Mr Caird, a conflation of the hectoring headmaster and the sadistic football coach in Loach's film. Caird reckons Gerry is a 'waste of space' compared to the 'good kids' who bring their sports kit neatly pressed and can read aloud from Macbeth. But Herman also gives us a Colin Welland figure of sympathetic authority in bonny drama teacher Miss Warren.

The heart-soaring moments of Kes come when Billy is out on the moor, alone with his bird and his passion. Purely Belter's breakout sequence duly comes when the lads nick Alan Shearer's sports car and zip out to Northumberland's glorious Kielder Forest, where they hold an impromptu symposium on class and destiny. Why is it that some folk get to be 'top drawer' while others are just 'scum'? (Gerry's examples are Bobby Robson and Ruud Gullit, which is worth a hollow laugh on Tyneside).

By now, Sewell no longer identifies with Gerry's aspirational dream of sitting among the corporate rabble at St. James's Park. In love with lovely Gemma, he believes he has something more solid. But Gemma will shortly desert Sewell for her own dream of a 'decent life', leaving the lads with nothing but each other, and the fluctuating fortunes of Newcastle United.

Still, Hermon clearly wants us to believe that these boys will get by. Chris Beattie and Greg McLane make very amiable leads, and there are incidental pleasures throughout the cast, from wall-eyed Alan Clarke alumnus Willie Ross to a rueful, almost silent turn from Roy Hudd. Tim Healy is totally repellent as Gerry's bad dad, especially in his startling karaoke rendition of that boozy, lachrymose standard, 'Always on my Mind'.

Andy Collins' camera finds a rosy beauty in Tyneside, though it lingers a little too long on Antony Gormley's colossally inane 'Angel of the North', to which Gerry and Sewell offer hopeful prayers until they realise it is a false idol (a 'big ****in' twat', to be precise). A more convincing idol is Shearer, the taciturn talisman of The Toon, once again rehearsing the talent for self-mockery he first explored in a series of burger commercials.

But Purely Belter's towering comic irony is that when Gerry finally gets a taste of live football, it's at Sunderland's 'Stadium of Light'. While the lads warily savour the atmosphere of a Mackem match-day, Sewell can only reminisce about his first trip to St James's Park ('In them days, anyone could go. You didn't have to be loaded'). Sir John Hall, ex-chairman of Newcastle PLC, once pledged 'a price for every pocket', but Purely Belter describes the shiny new privatised landscape of English football, where teenagers must stump up £500 apiece for season tickets.

The irony won't be lost on the loyal Mags who troop along to this toontastic north-east feast.

Richard Kelly."

[Greg J]

Shit. Is this film the future for our kids?