Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)

Without Billy Liar, British lives would be so much the poorer as generations of comedians thereafter would have been deprived of the perfect model for comedy variants on the kitchen sink drama. With the possible exception of the people of Leeds, that is, which is depicted as a hulking block of crushing prosaicism populated by raucous simpletons. Tom Courtenay's performance as the child-man Billy Fisher, hiding in his own fantasies and unable to stop his congenital lying, is a nimble one, even if his babbling hyperactivity - think Jerry Lewis or Robin Williams - grates across space and time before the end of the first reel. But there is a serious core to it too, with only one possible conclusion: you can take the North out of the man, but not the man out of the North.

6/10