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Tony Earnshaw: Waterhouse: the man who lived what Billy could only dream
Three months ago, I joined comedian Barry Cryer, author Barbara Taylor Bradford and poet Ian McMillan as commentators for a Radio 4 profile of Billy Liar which celebrated a half century since the character's birth.
Missing from the line-up was Billy's creator Keith Waterhouse, who died last week. Waterhouse was too ill to participate in the tribute, but was aware of the show and its background.
My contribution focused on the film Billy Liar, shot in Bradford and Leeds in 1962 by John Schlesinger with fledgling stars Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie leading a talented ensemble.
But while I waxed lyrical about the movie, its stars and that wonderful gritty milieu – a northern town as 1960s time capsule – I was also scrupulous in crediting the character of Billy to Waterhouse, like myself a writer with deep northern roots.
If Billy Fisher is a timeless Everyman, then he was given life by a man who cast an all-seeing eye over his home county and took from it
all the ingredients needed to create an arch fantasist and indolent wastrel.
Waterhouse was a man with an eye for detail. He understood people and used real life to inform a flight of fancy that has at its heart a terrified young man who is frightened of the shackles of conformity.
It's too easy, too convenient and too glib to cast Keith Waterhouse as Billy Fisher. But there is far more than just a slight autobiographical bent to this story of a funeral director's clerk who longs for the bright lights of the big city.
Waterhouse took off to the big city, too. Unlike Billy who only fantasised about being a writer, Waterhouse became one in London. He was a novelist, scriptwriter, dramatist and, for several years, an acerbic columnist for the Daily Mail. When directed at Waterhouse, the world "prolific" took on an entirely new meaning.
For many years he wrote in partnership with Willis Hall, who shares a co-writing credit on the film of Billy Liar as well as on a string of projects from That Was the Week That Was to Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. Hall, Waterhouse's junior by two months, died
in 2005.
Keith Waterhouse brought a combination of warmth and Yorkshire bluntness to his work. Everything he created, from A Kind of Loving to Budgie to Queenie's Castle to Worzel Gummidge benefited from his roots in Leeds and his background as a journalist in the city and beyond.
But it is for Billy Liar that he will be remembered, the story of a young man who weaves a complex web of lies and deceit that ends on a train platform as his one hope of escape pulls slowly out of the station.
Classy stuff, and as relevant today as it was when it debuted at the Cambridge Theatre in 1960.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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