What this 1970s film reveals about Broken Britain

Corrupt bobbies. Local government timeservers who treat young women as playthings. A country bogged down in never-ending crises, overseen by a rancid managerial class.

These aren’t the theoretical findings of some future report into rape gangs. As it happens, they’re the basis of O Lucky Man!, a film from the Edward Heath era that suggests self-interest and incompetence are an inescapable part of the national character.

When the Royal Court Theatre’s Lindsay Anderson directed it in 1973, the left was as keen as today’s online right to howl in anguish at a UK that had gone to the dogs.

Anderson had form in this regard. His Palme d’Or-winning addition to the Angry Young Man genre, 1968’s If…, culminates in a massacre of teachers and assorted shire Tories by the bolshy public schoolboy Mick Travis, played by a sardonic Malcolm McDowell.

The follow-up, loosely based on the actor’s young adulthood in the north of England, is more ambitious.