Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

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In the 1960s, after the appearance of Billy Liar, he was often classified as an "angry young man". This was not so. He had more in common with JB Priestley than John Braine. Like George Orwell, he had a deep love of England and the English, believing that our green and pleasant land was being traduced by a petty-minded army of bureaucrats. Politically, he was a romantic liberal. He was appointed CBE in 1991.

His 1959 book Billy Liar was subsequently filmed by John Schlesinger with Tom Courtenay as Billy. It was nominated in six categories of the 1964 BAFTA awards, including Best Screenplay, and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1963; in the early 1970s the sitcom Billy Liar based on the character was quite popular and ran to 25 episodes. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Then he got a call from an old friend from Leeds, Willis Hall, now a successful playwright. Together they wrote the screenplay of Billy Liar, filmed in 1963 with Tom Courtenay as Billy and making a star of Julie Christie. The story takes place in the course of a single Saturday in a northern city and is about a young clerk, Billy Fisher, whose daydreaming and hilarious lies have brought his work and love life to a point of crisis.Billy Liar is a short book. Joyce’s Ulysses is longer. But they both inhabit similar territory in that they follow a principal character through one day’s eventless events. Viewed in this light, Billy Liar becomes potentially much more than a comic romp through northern English quaintness. Billy Liar' became an instant hit following its first publication in 1959 and has been adapted into a play, a musical, a TV series and even a film.

Billy Liar is a sitcom of 26 30-minute episodes over two series made by London Weekend Television in 1973–1974 which starred Jeff Rawle as Billy Fisher. [1] In addition there was a short five-minute long special as part of the All Star Comedy Carnival broadcast on 25 December 1973. [2] Billy is also engaged to not one but two local young women, the sweet and virginal Barbara ( Helen Fraser) and the rough and ready Rita ( Gwendolyn Watts). Unbeknown to both women, they share an engagement ring. It is the freewheeling Liz ( Julie Christie) who has just recently returned from London however that Billy is truly in love with. Billy Fisher is a 19-year-old suffocating in a small fictional Yorkshire town and this book covers one day in his life. Billy works as an undertaker's clerk, is nagged by his mother and shouted at by his father, is engaged to two girls but is in love with a third and dreams of becoming a hit comedy writer. Feeling trapped by the monotony of his everyday life Billy frequently disappears into a world of daydreams and lies. Inevitably, Billy's compulsive lies begin to catch up with him.The film marked the breakthrough role of Julie Christie, who was nominated for a BAFTA award for her performance as Liz. The film was also nominated for another five BAFTAs. [7] Later whilst scouring the film catalogue at film school I discovered the classic 1963 film directed by John Schlesinger and starring Tom Courtenay as Billy Fisher. A film which took the grim up north stereotypes that had become the norm in British New Wave cinema and turned them on their head with comedy and the careful use of surrealism. Grouped with the Angry Young Men of British letters, who came to prominence in the late 50s and early 60s, Waterhouse's most famous creation is less angry with the status quo of post-war Britain than Arthur Seaton and Jimmy Porter, instead finding an escape from his frustrations by living in a dream world half of the time. As well as daydreaming the day away in his beloved Ambrosia, he spends most of his time thinking. Billy has two types of thinking: No.1 thinking which is deliberate, and controlled; and No.2 thinking which consists of obsessive speculation about all the what-if's of life, and to be avoided.

Despite listing "lunch" as his only recreation in Who's Who, Waterhouse's output was staggering. As well as the columns, there was his novel and film Billy Liar, and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, the play based on the excuse for the non-appearance in print of an equally heroic luncher. He also wrote scores more novels and scripts, and speeches for politicians including Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson. To escape the humdrum boredom of working for an undertaker, Billy Fisher escapes into a fantasy world, which irritates and annoys his father. [4] He and a workmate converse in what sounds like a double act. It’s supposed to be funny – and is. But before long, we are laughing at the two of them, not with them. It’s not original. Billy’s talent, it seems like that of everyone else, is mimicry, a cliched copying of what the mass media are feeding him. Taylor, B. F. (2006). The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency?. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0719069093. And there is enough of a cliffhanger to keep you wanting to know: will Billy go to London (and leave his troubles and his two-and-a-half fiancees behind) or will he stay to face the music?

Courtenay’s poignant performance captures the mood of early 1960s Britain, hesitant before the prospect of liberating times ahead, while Julie Christie makes an unforgettable impression as the free-spirited local girl heading for London’s bright lights. Both were nominated for BAFTAs. Waterhouse had something of a turbulent childhood and eventful youth himself. He was born and brought up in an impoverished neighbourhood in Leeds and being not so economically privileged meant that he also had to suffer some of the same mediocrity that Billy Fisher sees around him everyday. Unlike Waterhouse, though, who eventually worked his way up the ranks and became a strident and popular journalist in Fleet Street and then a respected writer too, Fisher's escape feels too remote to be ever a reality. He is raring to flee to London where he, as he hopes, will find his footing as a writer for a stand-up comic and yet that ambition is never realised because he is still caught up, not on his lies but also inexorably to his humdrum home town itself.

When Billy and Barbara offer to look after his difficult Grandmother so that his parents can go to the pub for a night out it transpires that Billy has other things on his mind rather than keeping Grandmother company. [4] He is perhaps best known as the author of Billy Liar, the story of a funeral-parlour worker, Billy Fisher, who indulges in Walter Mitty-like fantasies to escape his drab existence in a fictional Yorkshire town. The novel was later filmed in 1963 by John Schlesinger, starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie.His habitual embroidery of the truth, has left him tangled in a web of pointless lies. He has told: He had been a regular columnist for the Daily Mail for nearly a quarter of a century, writing more than 2,000 columns. I thought I was the only one who did this. The interior secondary monologue for my own amusement, since when I manage to say out loud what I think is great fun and such an amazing observation--it turns out I am as alone as the little prince on his lonely planet. Billy's girlfriend Barbara is an art student at Stradhoughton Art School. As far as Billy is concerned, painting means Paris and Paris means France, so his fantasies take on a distinctly romantic tone. [4]