DOUBLE VISION - Boxing for Hartlepool

George Bowes was a professional boxer whose career spanned the economic boom years of the late fifties and sixties. He was also a face worker at Blackhall Colliery in Co. Durham during the period of Roben's ‘rationalisation’ of the mining industry. Despite his acknowledged skill and effort, and against all predictions, George's ambition to win a title was never realised, but his aspirations have been fulfilled a generation later by the young boxers he trains at his own gym in Hartlepool. In one year George and John Feeney both held British Titles and Stuart Lithgow a Commonwealth Title.
In this partly dramatised film, the activities of the gym are seen against a background of economic decline, through the eyes of Ron (Sammy Johnson), an ex-boxer, and Ray (Ray Stubbs), a television researcher, whose research into a subject for which he has little affection, forms the framework of the film.

Even during the boom period of the fifties and sixties when Lord Robens was visiting drilling towns off Blackhall Colliery and promising ‘200 years of coal’ the Hartlepool area had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country. In the eighties, with steelworks and shipyards derelict, the region littered with abandoned mines, including Blackhall, the level is around 25%. Boxing has traditionally flourished in working-class areas, and in the past has been seen as an escape route from the web of poverty.

In this film, through his interviews with boxers in the 80's, Ray discovers reasons other than hunger to be the spur: a desire for the trappings of affluence; a holiday every year, house, car; the desire to be ‘somebody’ in a society where status is inexorably linked to ‘success’; the desire to lift a town from the bottom of the league, as expressed by George Feeney in his assertion that he is ‘boxing for Hartlepool’.

Through the conflict between the two dramatised characters, this film is an attempt to address the contradictions within a sport, accepted by all as brutalising and dangerous. It examines the dilemma of the boxers themselves, competitors in a free enterprise world, where ‘winning is the proof of everything’ and losers are destined for oblivion. ‘You deserve nothing that your two hands can't earn.’ Like the earlier film Keeping Time, Double Vision grew out of a documentary process, the drama being developed to examine questions it was throwing up.

AMBER FILMS

Made under the auspices of the ACTT Workshop Declaration with financial assistance from Northern Arts and Channel Four Television.