Letter to Brezhnev, 1985
“Everyone in Liverpool is walking around with a film script in their pocket.”
Letter to Brezhnev put Liverpool (and Kirkby) on the cinematic map in 1985.
The BFI website calls it "one of the key British films of the 1980s". The Post calls it “Liverpool’s greatest rom-com”.
I called it “a comedy-romance” because the term rom-com hadn’t been invented yet.
From my memoir:
“Margi Clarke once said “Everyone in Liverpool is walking around with a film script in their pocket.” She was right, too, except sometimes it was a demo tape, and sometimes it was both.
It was our secret – people outside the city had no idea – but creativity in Liverpool was everywhere. It wasn’t just for the middle classes either. At grassroots level, unseen by the mainstream, people were playing with music, theatre, art and now film.
Margi had made her name locally as Tony Wilson’s sidekick Margox on Granada TV’s What’s On slot, and made her name nationally in the 1985 film Letter to Brezhnev. She always had star quality and she shone in the film, written by her brother Frank and directed by Chris Bernard.
I went along to the premiere in Kirkby, where Margi and Frank were from. The grim, grey 1960s town centre didn’t actually have a cinema, so the premiere was in the civic hall, which was as depressing as it sounds. The film was the opposite of depressing. It was brash, funny, and full of style and ideas. Like the Liverpool I loved.”
LETTER TO BREZHNEV
Melody Maker, October 19, 1985
IF most people outside Liverpool don't know where Toxteth is, a lot of people inside Liverpool don't know where Kirkby is. It's one of those New Towns, on the outskirts of the city, that are dragged up every time a man-made ghetto of deprivation is needed to illustrate Sixties planning madness — as problematic and unappealing to the outsider as the inner city, but less exciting.
This is hardly the stuff which dreams are made of, but for once a dream has been made. Kirkby doesn't even have its own cinema but it's just been the location for the world premiere of a movie made, against all odds, in Kirkby and Liverpool by Kirkby and Liverpool people. "Letter To Brezhnev", the brainchild of writer Frank Clarke and director Chris Bernard, began life as a script and a group of friends, all clutching collectively at the first rungs of creative careers but first-timers in the film business.
Determination and belief were their main resources, the legendary shoe-string budget was found, bit by bit, and finally there's a finished feature film — at an eventual cost of just half a million pounds — with a distribution deal from Palace Pictures, a soundtrack on London records (with original music from Alan Gill, with a song from Margi Clarke, along with tracks from Bronski Beat, Sandy Shaw, and others), and an award from the Venice Film Festival.
It's already been hailed as proof of an indigenous Liverpool film industry, and perhaps it could be. Cast and crew are almost entirely Liverpool-based (Peter Firth and Alfred Molina, the two male principals, are exceptions), and the people of Kirkby have already claimed it as their own.
In fact, what's unique about the film is the very way that its identity is so closely linked to the community that spawned it. Kirkby, like anywhere else, does have dreams, and sometimes they come true.
In the film, the dream is Elaine's, a Kirkby girl (Alexandra Pigg) with nothing in life but the dole, and the hope of romance — which comes in the person of Peter (Peter Firth), a young Russian sailor. It's love at first sight for the couple — while their companions Teresa and Sergei (Margi Clarke and Alfred Molina) are more concerned with "having a good time" — and they refuse to give it up. When Peter has to return to Russia, they determine that nothing will stop them being reunited, hence Elaine's "letter to Brezhnev". It's a modern-day fairy tale, full of glamour and innocence (and a Liverpool lovingly, beautifully shot), but at the same time as earthily realistic as 1980s Kirkby has to be. Elaine dreams in slow-motion gloss but no romantic heroine ever questioned another girl's boyfriend's sexual proficiency in quite the terms she does.
The film's a comedy-romance, and (says its writer) is "about peace'… and its Liverpool isn't the Liverpool of popular (mis)conception. As Margi Clarke says: "There's absolutely no nostalgia in this film — it's totally new." This is neither the Liverpool of Alan Bleasdale or the Liverpool of Derek Hatton. This belongs to a new generation — the Pete Wylies, the Macs, the habitués of the hi-tech art-deco State Ballroom where the film courtship starts. Money doesn't talk in this Liverpool because there isn't any, but style and ideas do. This Liverpool is brash, funny and couldn't give a damn (to put it more politely than the makers of the film ever would).
It's personified in Margi Clarke, Frank's sister, who plays Elaine's friend Teresa with the kind of panache which should make her a star for at least 15 minutes. Since her days as Margox, "the first punk comedienne", in one of Tony Wilson's Granada series, she's always been the sort of person for whom media phrases like "outrageous" were coined. Teresa is an equally colourful character ("I don't stuff chickens", says Margi, "but we are alike"): brazen, outspoken, amoral, and with the wit and style to get away with it. It's a style that has nothing to do with cool: in the nightclub scene she changes from chicken factory uniform into sophisticated Hollywood glamour, then eyes up her man through the bottom of a wine bottle and plots her moves sitting on the toilet. She's what they call in Liverpool "hard-faced", which means she knows what she wants and exactly how to get it. It's that spirit, with some of Elaine's determined romanticism, that's made the whole enterprise possible.
The story in the film is about not giving up on a dream: the story of the film says the same. Maybe one day, even, Kirkby will get another cinema.
Was an extra in "The State" sequence as I became friendly with Frank Clarke when I worked behind the bar on Jody's and his friend John, who took photo's of myself, Margi Clarke and Alexandra Pig for a set of Christmas cards sold in Probe, Xtremes and various other shops in Liverpool. Had a brilliant day on that shoot. Really hit it off with Alfred Molina and we all went over to the pub later on. Alex was seeing Peter Firth at the time and they, of course, married many years later. Life imitating art? Great memories.
I never knew her brother wrote it.
Margi is an underrated icon.
As for Liverpool, what an absolute haven of culture. Only been 3 times but adore it. So many galleries and museums.