The Greatness of Tom Courtney...

A rain sodden Friday night in home town Northern Ireland. It's too wet to venture out to get pissed without the taxi fare home and it's too wet to make a dash for it and spend the rest of the evening drying off your Wranglers in front of your local pub's open fire. You know it's not going to stop pissing down until at least tomorrow tea time and even if you do brave the endless rain, the puddles, the  dreaded hair disaster, the damp Wranglers and the pub...there will be sweet fuck all to do after the six pints and twenty fags, and like most of the other folk you will call it a night and resign yourself to the obligatory hangover. For a second you warm to the possibility of a 'lock in', but you realise, this will not be happening because the owner simply wants to shut up this damp bar and piss off to bed the minute that the hour hand hits 11PM.

So instead, you bite the bullett, swallow your bile inflected misery and turn on the  T.V. and slump into what passes for entertainment.  Meanwhile the end of the week descends on you like a weighted blanket and your stomach churns as you resign yourself to the reality that your one shot at some semblance of glory has definitely passed you by for another week. 

A cup of tea, some toast, that's as good as you think it's going to get until a black and white movie flickers into view on good old BBC 2. It's not 'this is what your Granny watched' black and white, more, 'early sixties kitchen sink grey and white'. 

There's a light flurry of flute music, (you think..."is this Kes?" for a moment, but no, that was definitely shot in colour) then you recognise a face. Hold on, that's the guy from The Likely Lads and that's definitely a very young John Thaw from The Sweeney. The Friday evening blues start to fade as the opening titles come into view. 

A scrawny, underfed war baby, in a white gym slip and worn black plimsolls, with a horror of a pudding basin hair cut, (this is definitely pre Beatles), runs through the opening sequence gasping, chest heaving, head back, chin extended, splashing through endless puddles. As the title music fades into the opening scene, you sit back and relax into the knowledge that, no matter what, you are going to love this simple little movie... 

The movie is "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", and the runner is Tom Courtney.