Once A Year On Blackpool Sands is a gritty queer comedy-drama, set in the North of England in the early 1950’s. Based on a true story, director Karlton Parris’s heart-warming film echoes the tradition of ‘kitchen sink’ dramas from that period. This film is based on his play of the same title which showed in both the UK and US.
The year is 1953. The Queen has recently had her coronation and post-war-time food rationing still exists in the UK. Eddy (Kyle Brookes) and Tommy (Macaulay Cooper) are miners, living and working in a poor close-knit Yorkshire mining community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Not ideal if you’re queer and want to have fun. Homosexuality was still illegal in the UK and society was very homophobic so very few people were out and proud. Life for queers, especially in small towns and villages, was tough.
Eddie and Tommy are lovers but need to keep their love secret. Their clandestine hookups in a pigeon shed in one of their family’s back gardens are hardly ideal and they are both looking forward to their village’s annual trip to Blackpool. There they can share a room for a week in a hotel run by a landlady sympathetic to the queer cause. The night before the trip, however, Eddy gets arrested by the police for cottaging and turns up late for the coach trip bruised and battered from a police beating. Will they be able to keep their love for each-other secret if Eddy’s arrest gets reported in the local newspaper?
Parris successfully takes us back in time to a bleak, dark period for queers. His script combines humorous northern comedy with angst-filled emotional lines. We meet a cast of real characters, both on the coach trip and in the hotel in Blackpool. Stand-out personalities include Gladys, the queer-friendly landlady at their hotel, Withering Heights on Sea; her flirty daughter Maureen, Red Ethel, Gladys’ communist lesbian mother, and Mr Elbridge, a transvestite, who plans to walk from Blackpool’s North Pier to the South Pier dressed as a woman – a risky thing to do. The characters all display the real courage and passion it took to be queer back then. Although some of the scenes are a little long and the script could do with a sharper edit, this is a warm, funny, sad, thought-provoking film and the strength of the casting, acting and characters will keep your attention.
The real-life Eddy Corkhill and Tommy Price did indeed go to Blackpool every year for a week where they could be their liberated queer selves. Each year they would walk hand-in-hand between Blackpool’s piers and slowly encouraged other queers to do the same, effectively creating the UK’s first Queer Pride March. People like these guys paved the way for future queer rights. It’s so sad that this generation of queers, who had so much to deal with just to live a normal day to day life, were then so cruelly affected by the AIDS virus in the 1980s, just as life was becoming easier for them.
P.S. Once A Year on Blackpoll Sands from BabyDog Films is screening at Miami’s OUTSHINE Film Festival in person and online
Review: Ris Fatah Queerguru Contributing Editor Ris Fatah is a successful fashion/luxury business consultant (when he can be bothered) who divides and wastes his time between London and Ibiza. He is a lover of all things queer, feminist, and human rights in general. @ris.fatah
