Politics of Brassed Off '˜would stop it being made today'

But one of the stars of bittersweet comedy-drama Brassed Off says he believes the film set in the Yorkshire coalfields and dealing with pit closures and the fallout of the Miners’ Strike would not get made today.

The film, about the troubles faced by a colliery brass band as they face the closure of their pit, was based on the real-life story of the village of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire, which was named as the most deprived place in the country in the 1990s.

Jim Carter, who played euphonium player Harry in the 1996 film and is now best known for his role as Carson the butler in Downton Abbey, says the film would struggle to gain the necessary backing from studios to be brought into existence these days.

“They would be frightened. It was too party political and partisan for the modern financier,” he said.

The film, written and directed by Mark Herman, stars the late Pete Postlethwaite as Danny, the devoted leader of the Grimley Colliery Band, who is determined to show the Tories ‘we are not defeated’. Ewan McGregor, Stephen Tompkinson and Tara Fitzgerald are among those in the impressive ensemble cast.

It is set a decade after the year-long strike in 1984/85 at a time when miners were facing the difficult choice between accepting pit closures or fighting for their survival – with the risk of losing out on redundancy payouts for their years of service.

In an interview with the Radio Times, the Harrogate-born actor said he has spent much of his career avoiding people “trying to make me a professional Northerner”. “They all think you’re working class whether you are or not. Harrogate is not the pit face,” he said.

Carter also said he would struggle to be a butler in real life, despite the widespread acclaim he won for the role of Carson.

Discussing visiting Los Angeles for his latest project, a Radio 4 documentary on American cricket called Howzat for Hollywood, Carter told Radio Times magazine: “People come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God, I love your programme, oh my God!’ They wish life were like that. I say, ‘It’s not a documentary, you know’. Besides, I wouldn’t want to be a butler, standing around posh people who don’t know how to feed themselves. Invent a buffet, help yourselves!”

Carter says there is one scene of Downton Abbey that still bothers him when his character Carson was playing cricket and bowls a very slow delivery.

“The edit wasn’t great,” he says. “I have to say neither the writer nor director were cricketers. In my head when I came up to bowl I was Freddie Truman, but when you see it there’s this portly gentleman barely able to get his arm over the horizontal.”

Howzat for Hollywood, which will be broadcast on Saturday at 10.30am, tells the story of the Hollywood Cricket Club with Carter revealing details of the days when Errol Flynn and David Niven flashed the willow, Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone waited for a tickle at slip, Boris Karloff kept wicket, and Elizabeth Taylor and Olivia De Havilland were in the pavilion preparing the cream teas.

Carter says: “Those actors knew their stock in trade was their Englishness and they maintained it through their lifestyle with the Hollywood Cricket Club. The more English they were, the more saleable they were in a way. It was a brand extension. But today British actors routinely play American roles and what was once a three-week journey from the UK to LA can now be done in ten hours. So the social side, almost inevitably, died out.”