Hard Labour was a TV film made for the 'Play For Today' series on the BBC. Mike Leigh was one of the most notable directors for this particular format and would go on to contribute the stonewall classics Nuts in May and Abigail's Party. Where those two had quite a bit of social commentary, they were comedies; Hard Labour, on the other hand, is anything but. It is instead a relentlessly depressing slice of life drama about the miserable lives of several working class characters in a bleak northern town.
It's a pretty experimental film in some ways, as it basically hardly has a plot of any kind; instead it adopts the approach that Ken Loach introduced with Up the Junction (1965), which he contributed for the BBC series 'The Wednesday Play', which was a format that predated 'Play For Today'. Loach's film also had really no story but was a slice of life of several working class people; with Hard Labour, Leigh did a similar thing but in a much more grimly downbeat manner. Both films do share a focus on extreme realism, with a complete absence of gloss of any kind. While I respect what Leigh was trying to do here, I can't honestly say I enjoyed this very much at all. It was too much of a downer, although I suppose that was the point. The cast all give good naturalistic performances, with especial praise due to a young Ben Kingsley, who was particularly good as a cabby who has a side line in connecting women with backstreet abortionists.
