An explicit kitchen-sink drama set in Barking, centering on dysfunction, lost opportunities and violent, drunken reactions in a family that’s coming apart at the seams
‘What’s wrong with being a housewife?’ asks Bill of his teenage girlfriend.
“Nothing’, replies Phyllis, ‘as long as it comes naturally’. But after escaping an Ireland where she ‘couldn’t give a tinker’s curse for the bloody I.R.A., hurling or Gaelic’, Phyllis finds the only things that come naturally within family-life in working-class London are random beatings, casual racism and emotional brutality.
‘God Save The Village Green’ is a vicious portrait of a London-Irish family at odds with itself. An explicit kitchen-sink drama set in Barking between the mid 1960s and the early 1980s, it centres on dysfunction, lost opportunities and violent, drunken reactions in a family that’s coming apart at the seams.
The story of the Knighton family is only going to play out one way.
Or is it?