Film: Asked to provide a mini-biography for the Planet Britain project, Ken Loach wrote that a recurring theme of his work "has been to explore the two curses of the labour movement: Stalinism and social democracy, the latter exemplified by the Blairite project of trying to give a radical gloss to hard-line capitalist politics". His entry was omitted.
Anthony Hayward's biography has been published to mark the 40th anniversary of Loach's screen career, one that started with the BBC's innovative Wednesday Play, came to wider attention with the making of Kes in 1969 and, after a lean time in the Thatcher years, found new audiences and financing in the 1990s. What binds together these films - Poor Cow (1967), Riff-Raff (1991), Ladybird Ladybird (1994), My Name is Joe (1998) - is a strongly held belief that poverty ruins lives.
Hayward is a journalist and the value of this book is its detailing of how Loach constructs his films, from scripting through financing, casting and his now infamous habit of shooting in sequence and drip-feeding the script to the cast so that they, like the audience, do not know what will happen next. To achieve realism, Loach likes to startle his actors, often non-professionals or performers from other media. As early as Cathy Come Home (1966), he shot the scene where Cathy's children are taken away by social workers with so little advance preparation that the children genuinely believed they were being abducted. Since one was the actress's real-life son, the trauma for both cast and crew was substantial. The end, as far as Loach was concerned, justified the means, giving rise to a national debate about homelessness.
Loach granted his biographer generous access to his time and his archives, a double-edged gift that brings the writer dangerously close to his subject. It is not quite fair to say that Hayward sacrifices critical distance but he is perhaps a little disingenuous in omitting to reflect on the films as films or at least acknowledge the aesthetic debates that they have sparked off. Nobody would disagree that Loach's politics come from the heart and that in writers such as Jim Allen and Paul Laverty he found like-minded spirits, as committed as he has been to exposing the evils of a class-based society. At their best, his works make you feel their central protagonists' helplessness intensely. In their weakest moments, usually sententious speeches, they come across as indigestible tracts. Loach's dilemma has always been how to combine dramatic interest with political consciousness raising.
Hayward spends considerable time exploring the extent to which Loach was muzzled by a compliant television hierarchy and the other strength of his book lies in reminding us of Loach's spiky relationship with the political establishment and what he considers its lackey union leaders. It must have come as a relief to them when he turned his attention to historic injustices overseas with Land and Freedom (1995), about the Spanish civil war, and Carla's Song (1996), largely set in Nicaragua. Remarkably, few critics seem to have considered that such tales might function as parables for New Labour policies at home.
If we learn a great deal more about Loach the filmmaker from this biography, we come little closer to the individual. Glimpses of his obsessive nature are tempered by warm testimonials from the many actors and other collaborators whom Hayward interviews. Overall, the impression is of an individual for whom compromise is anathema. Hayward stops short of comparisons but I don't ever see the director in question proposing that ballet lessons for boys are an alternative to life down the mines.
• Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin. Her latest book, Irish National Cinema, was recently published by Routledge