Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down

Two 16-year-old schoolgirls from a sink estate in Bradford find fun and happiness by shacking up with a middle-aged married man — if you’ve never seen it, it sounds like the worst movie ever made. Yet Rita, Sue and Bob Too was a delight, one of the best British films of the 1980s, and this month it’s being rereleased in a new restoration by the BFI.

I saw it when it first came out, in 1987, and fell head over heels in love with it. At last, here was a film about working-class life that wasn’t glum. Watching it again, 30 years on, it still feels just as fresh and funny, but the landscape it describes has changed. Billed as ‘Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down’, it now plays like a period piece — a picture of a starker, simpler world, where Bacardi was the drug of choice and sex was something that happened on the back seat of your brother’s Ford Cortina.