The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

In 1962, a film appeared that left a permanent impression and may have changed my life. I saw Tony Richardson's THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER in a cinema in Brighton, shortly after moving to Britain in 1963. The lean and bony features of Tom Courtney's face instilled in me an intense yearning of wanting to belong to the English working class, one of the true aristocracies of the human race, as it seemed to me: noble in spirit, brave in adversity, resolute in action. The feeling is long gone, but its memory returned when I saw a young Tim Roth in Mike Leigh's MEANTIME many, many years later. What made Tom Courtney special, though, was that he was a runner. As one reviewer put it: “You can almost smell the wet leaves of the forests and hills, and feel the cold of the morning air as you follow Courtney on his daily jog. England, with its crummy weather, declining manufacturing economy, post-imperial history and hugely varied terrain, is particularly well-suited to the sport. Distance running is primarily a solitary activity, designed for bona-fide introverts, obsessive individuals who do not mind pain, and in some cases, may actually enjoy it.”

Courtney plays Colin, a Nottingham boy in his late teens, who is sent to borstal for robbing a bakery. In the reformatory school he is spotted as a “natural” by the upper-class governor with a mission. He gives Colin special privileges because he wants to groom him as a runner to lead the prison team in a muchanticipated long-distance race against a local public school. The ensuing conflict of whether Colin can be bribed into betraying his class, or would a victory be his alone, had a lot of resonance in the early 1960s, when – in the wake of the writings of Richard Hoggart and the education policies of the new Labour Government under Harold Wilson – working-class boys began entering British universities and the professions in significant numbers. “To join the establishment or to jinx it?” could have been the motto of Britain's “Swinging Sixties.”