Reportedly in the 1980s, snooker saw a massive boost in popularity, pulling in millions upon millions for TV broadcasts of games. The past is another country and all that. I can’t remember a time when televised snooker wasn’t deemed to be somewhere around the nadir of the schedule, but there you are, I guess. To this end, there was a vague interest in trying to capture the, ahem, ‘excitement’ in film format; a more British counterpart to the poolhall movies America occasionally put out, and occasionally continue to occasionally put out to this day… occasionally. Indeed, there were actually two films that tried to transpose pool hustlin’ to the snooker table. This here thing was preceded, though not exactly by much, by Number One (1984), which saw the reunion of Law & Order’s (not that one) and The Nation’s Health’s director and writer, Les Blair and G.F. Newman, and which starred Bob Geldof and Mel Smith. Really. I haven’t seen it, though the poster has the tagline “[t]he only thing straight about him is his cue!…” Ooh, er, missus! Incidentally Phil Daniels is in that thing’s cast as well. Apparently, he’s a boxing promoter rather than a snooker player though.

Anyway, that’s for another time, maybe. Here I’m-a talkin’ about the later, but not exactly by much, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, a film described by the BFI as “undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history”. And from that description, you just know they had to get social realist master Alan Clarke to direct the script written by gangland drama maven Trevor Preston. To be fair, the talents involved here aren’t quite as insane conceptually as they sound; Preston had created and wrote popular children’s serial Ace of Wands (1970-1972) which married occultism, the criminal underworld, and various subcultural shenanigans of the day (though I gather the thing was originally pitched as magician solving ‘impossible’ crimes with his knowledge of trickery, like a proto-Jonathan Creek), and Clarke had directed the bizarre pre-Christian philosophical fantasia Penda’s Fen (1974) and Thatcherite dystopian nightmare Stars of the State Roller Disco (1984), so it’s not like they were coming at this sort of thing entirely blind. Also, the music’s composed by the guy who did the music for Gandhi and Dangerous Liaisons. So that’s fun to think about.

The plot concerns a grudge match between up-and-coming snooker star Billy Kidd (Phil Daniels) and incumbent world champ Maxwell Randall (Alun Armstrong), players with gimmicks who wear them on their sleeves. Billy obviously has a cowboy theme while Maxwell has a vampiric thing going on. So as you know, this was inspired by an actual thing involving a match between a young Jimmy White and Ray ‘Dracula’ Reardon in the early ‘80s. Not that they had gimmicky presentations per se; Reardon’s nickname was just based around his appearance rather than any deliberately cultivated image; other than that, they are/were pretty regular snooker players. Still, with one of the players being ostensibly vampiric, why not go the whole hog and echo the famously terrible Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966)? A film that tells you pretty much all you need to know in its title; Billy the Kid and Dracula are going through a bitter divorce and the film chronicles the custody battle over their son. Dracula is played by John Carradine. Some of what I just wrote was true. See if you can guess which bits are. The loser of this match has to retire, which seems a bit harsh, but there you are. However, there’s more to this high stakes match-up; Billy’s manager has himself a gambling addiction and has racked up quite the debt with the shadiest loan shark in town. Fortunately, said loan shark is evidently big into snooker and is willing to call off the debt if Billy faces off 17 frames with Maxwell. And with that, Billy’s manager with the aid of a journalist set off to shit stir in order to get the otherwise disinterested pair at each other’s throats; a plan that works only too well, with the conflict ballooning into a symbolic clash between every conceivable element of modern culture.

Despite his prominence, having directed myriad TV films and plays, this was only Clarke’s second theatrical effort, and his penultimate one at that; it was preceded by a remake of Scum (1979) (he also directed the original unaired-at-the-time TV version a couple of years before) and followed by Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). It’s also the most obscure of the three, both in terms of fame and in regards of its weird subject matter and style. Network Releasing’s DVD release of the film comes with an essay by film scholar David Rolinson that wryly observes that Clarke’s theatrical films somehow seem less cinematic than much of his TV work. I’m not really in a good position to comment on that claim, but it nevertheless seems worth mentioning the style of the film which is deliberately, self-consciously stagey. The entire world of the film is constructed on a soundstage with no appearance by the world outside whatsoever, giving the film an artificiality that further adds to the strangeness of the product as a whole. Don’t go thinking this was some no budget affair either; it cost in the region of £2.7 million, which may not sound like all that much, but would seem a fairly O.K. budget for a British film in the mid-‘80s, particularly one without a major (read: ‘American’) studio backing it, and particularly one that seems so flagrantly unmarketable. Outside of maybe Goldcrest (at this time waist deep in production of a seemingly more obviously marketable flop musical, 1986’s Absolute Beginners), you probably weren’t going to get all that much more without looking for foreign investment, and god knows this doesn’t seem like a project that’d set American investors hearts ablaze or even continental ones’. No, the stagey-ness of the thing is very much a conscious design choice, and one that apparently caused some friction between Clark and Preston; the latter apparently wanted actual east end streets and snooker halls and such. This might have made the disparity of people bursting into song on the regular more apparent, but he wound up taking a back seat due to a depressive episode (Preston suffered from bipolar disorder), and so Clark’s vision won out. Nevertheless, it makes a certain degree of sense. The film’s sets are entirely based on interiors, the closest the characters come to existing out-of-doors is an inky black void filled with dry ice that surrounds Billy’s car while he’s (ostensibly) being driven from place to place. A song posits snooker as metaphor for life, “a world in a frame”. The characters are thus trapped in boxes, in essence, defined, at least outwardly, purely by their relationship with a parlour game. If snooker is indeed the world within a frame however… the game is ultimately about destroying it.

Incidentally, the film ends on an odd note.

So, yes, a strange excursion into British cinema following the collapse of the grand American Dream of the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. I suppose I’ve spoken about the visual design and mise-en-scène quite a bit, but not really the performances. They’re all pretty solid; the weakest link probably being Daniels who occasionally seems to have difficulty spitting out the more idiosyncratic spoken dialogue. Only the spoken stuff though. Apparently singing weird turns of phrase is fine. He was presumably supposed to be the big name of the cast, having had a bunch of major film roles, most notably as the lead in Quadrophenia (1979); Armstrong’s film work had mostly been minor roles up to this point, with his more prominent gigs being TV stuff, and indeed the rest of the cast is mostly comprised of people who might have been vaguely familiar from off the telly. Except for Louise Gold, the arguable female lead, who probably wouldn’t be recognisable, because her big things at the time was the Muppets and Spitting Image (she was Nancy Reagan and the Queen, in case you were wondering); apparently, she still does Muppet stuff.

A point of concern at the time was apparently the absence of bright colours, big catchy numbers and general jollity for a musical (Rolinson specifically references Singin’ in the Rain as a comparison), thereby solidifying its status as ‘hard sell’ to prospective distributors and audiences (the film, by most accounts, barely saw theatrical release, with the TV airing in ’87 (Channel 4 invested in the film, though uncredited therein, meaning it made its way to broadcast relatively quickly) being the thing’s first wide exposure),* as well as again leading one to wonder if anyone actually looked at this before greenlighting it. That does it a disservice however. The songs are packed with wordplay and wit, the production design is pretty incredible, and the whole thing is almost certainly unique (though, let’s face it, probably for a reason). It should be a cult classic, provided people actually discover it.

† This is why some sources list it as being a 1987 film rather than 1985.