A comedy of appalling and almost consistently amusing squalor, set in sooty Northern England, about a romantic triangle (quadrangle, if you remember the wife) composed of two teenage babysitters and the baby's father. The only clue that these people (Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes, and George Costigan, in the order named) are actors and not their real selves is their total lack of self-consciousness in front of a camera. You certainly couldn't tell it by their total lack of glamour: the sight of the two babysitters dancing in front of rock videos on the telly, or just sitting jigglingly on the couch and watching (straightening up right quick at the sound of the grownups coming home), tells you more about teenagers than you probably want to know. The camera itself, doggedly nosy but leerily distance-keeping, takes on an almost human quality in its eye-level gaze and its pantingly perambulatory movement: a sort of invisible companion careful not to bump into anyone and give itself away. It does lack a certain sharpness and penetratingness of vision, as if in need of corrective lenses or more likely a good wipe of ones it has already got. But even this, combined with the other humanlike limitations of the camera, is a sort of stylistic complement to the lives of slovenliness on view. Written by Andrea Dunbar; directed by Alan Clarke. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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