Director Ken Loach Says Spirit of '45 'only Way Forward'

Director Ken Loach is not impressed. "Happy films for happy people" is the withering verdict of the man who made his name with the likes of "Cathy Come Home" and "Kes" on much of today's film and television.

Movies and programs now "don't ask questions... like a soft cushion for the brain... the life squeezed out of it by so many bureaucrats above," he says.

His latest film "The Spirit of '45", an archive documentary about the 1945 general election and the creation of the welfare state by Clement Attlee's Labor government, is the Loach antidote to such visual "comfort food".

At a time when the 76-year-old filmmaker sees worrying parallels in the Britain of the 1930s, he believes it is timely to look back and remember "how we got out of it" last time.

"I wanted to say that this (free health care, decent housing, financial support for the old and unemployed) is possible and... not an act of God," he says. "That the neo-conservative idea of the free market and the kind of raw capitalism will never provide a dignified and secure life for people."

Loach, who is known for his socialist convictions, argues that you do not have to look far in modern-day Britain for echoes of the poverty that led to the establishment of the welfare state after World War II.

And he deplores the failure of television and film to highlight and explore what is going on, viewing much of what is on offer on our screens as increasingly "irrelevant to what's happening" in Britain today.

"You think what's going on in the country -- it's a society in chaos. There's dysfunction, alienation amongst young people and you look at the TV drama and it no way reflects that," the British director told Agence France Presse in an interview in Paris.

What Loach sees in the most deprived pockets of some parts of Britain such as Liverpool, the northeast, Glasgow and east London is mass unemployment, great poverty of the sort "marked by obesity rather than starvation" and the rise of the far right.

A generation of young people whose material security less than a decade ago seemed so assured now sees its future as "negligible", he says.

"Talking to young people, they don't expect to get a job, they don't expect to have a house, they don't expect to necessarily even be able to bring up a family.

"They're not thinking politically but they're saying that's their future... a future without hope... I think the (1930s) parallel is there and it's very dangerous."

Loach blames overly commercial and prescriptive television and film executives obsessed with market share for what he sees as a loss of choice.

"Cathy Come Home", written by Jeremy Sandford, about a family's downward spiral into homelessness, highlighted a lack of proper housing in Britain and sparked public outrage when it was broadcast on the BBC in 1966.

Today, however, he believes filmmakers would find it impossible to get something similar made due to the endless layers of "bureaucrats" working above them.

"There were none really (then), it was just the producer and the head of drama and sometimes he would see it before it went out and sometimes he wouldn't.

"It was a very benign supportive process. It only lasted a few years and, yes, we had battles of course but the battle lines were drawn in a far more generous way, so that there was far more freedom."

Despite the difficulties, Loach's output is prolific, with six films for the big screen in the last decade alone including "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" which won the 2006 Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Retirement often crosses his mind, he says, when he feels like an "old racehorse" who is "not sure I can get round the course".

But for now "there's too much to do, really", including another film in the early planning stages with writer Paul Laverty.

"We are hoping to do something in Ireland, maybe set in the 1930s, 10 years after "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," he adds.

"We haven't really worked it out yet, it's just a twinkle in the eye at the moment."