Gregory's Girl

24/03/2025

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  Comedy is often based on contradicting assumptions and expectations. An apparent idiot proves cleverer than the well-educated; the woman proves stronger than the man; the lowly worker knows better how to run the business than the CEO. In Gregory’s Girl, Bill Forsyth shows a working-class town as idyllic, a female footballer as better than the blokes, and that wisdom is often best found in the very young. The film was shot in Cumbernauld, one of five Scottish New Towns built after the war. They may have been produced out of post-war optimism and a house-building boom, but these were not luxurious homes: they were pragmatic improvements over the places many would have left. The towns were built to counter the overcrowding in city centre areas like the Gorbals, and if working folk were no longer inside the city, they did at least have inside loos. This could seem a surprising luxury: “By 1970, man had landed on the moon, yet one in four Scots still had to share an outdoor toilet.” (BBC) The New Towns had indoor plumbing and if much comedy has been predicated on toilet humour, part of the low-key utopia of Forsyth’s vision is that here he shows us houses that are fully fitted homes, no matter their modest size and their uniform look. 

      Many a film has taken a new town environment and played up the despondency, whether it be A Clockwork Orange and Thamesmead, or Bloody Kids and Stevenage. The English New Town became equated with post-war architecture more generally, and concrete connoted gloom. Forsyth resists the despair and points up the municipal: here is an environment with a strong sense of community (even if it often manifests itself in gossip), a school with ample playing fields and classes where cookery is open to boys and girls. Forsyth uses the Cumbernauld environment to show old verities dying and new possibilities becoming available. It is partly why the young become the wise: in a society trying to evolve, ancient wisdom can seem like needless bigotry. Even the fifteen-year-old central character Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) appears a fogey: when his younger sister’s friend comes round to the house looking for Maddie, Gregory tells him to get lost: “you’re talking of my sister and she doesn’t go with walks with anybody… Act your age. Go and break some windows, demolish some phone boxes. Underage walks, dates. You’ll run out of vices before your twelve if you don’t slow down.” The film also has two first-year boys who seem so much more in the know than the fourth years and the teachers. At the beginning of the film, Gregory and his mates are staring from behind a tree at a nurse getting undressed next to the window. She takes off her bra and they are overwhelmed; happy, they retreat from the scene. After they’ve left, the first-years appear and say to each other “all that fuss over a bit of tit, eh”, while noticing that she is now removing her knickers too. Later, a first-year advises another kid in the school canteen not to touch the ravioli, it is garbage. The PE teacher appears just afterwards and takes the pasta option. Age does not bestow wisdom, though the impression of hierarchy must be maintained. When the school’s cookery whizkid Steve visits the headmaster (Chic Murray), it is to discuss baking as we see a meeting of equals. When the boy leaves the office and the PE teacher waits outside, the head turns officious and authoritarian. Steve plays along but the film shows the head clumsily wiping away the crumbs from a choux pastry like a boy found out. 

     Forsyth’s take is that new towns demand new thinking, and who better to do much of it than the very young? Maddie is probably the film’s youngest and yet wisest character. As she says to her friend, she has to go up to the big school: there is family trouble; Gregory has fallen in love. She offers it with the rueful awareness that she has seen it all before even if she will later say to her brother, when he asks her what she dreams about, that she dreams of ginger beer and ice cream. As she says: “I’m still a little girl remember.” She is so self-aware that she can even acknowledge how un-grown up she is. 

       The New Town environment allows the housing boom to meet the baby boom. When Gregory walks out of his home, a tracking shot shows him almost tripping up over child after child. Gregory’s mother is never seen and his father has a brief role as a driving instructor whose client (whose name the father gets wrong) almost runs Gregory over. The whole film shows a youth environment where the older generation are interlopers and, while this might indicate ageism, in Forsyth’s vision, it suggests hope: a vision of the future cannot be contained in the bodies of the old and must be observed in the aspirations of the young. In Forsyth’s take it might be comedic to show kids running the show or full of know-how, but this is where Forsyth’s optimism is at its most utopian. If George Bernard Shaw reputedly said youth is wasted on the young, then Forsyth thinks it needn’t be so, and where better than a New Town environment to make such a claim? If the future resides in youth, then how to resolve the conundrum of a world belonging to the young but where they are deemed incapable of the wisdom needed to live fully in it? 

     Forsyth proposes that comedy can help us solve this problem by reversing expectations, as he says, “even with the teachers in the staff room – they’re more like giggling kids than the kids are. And of course the headmaster is the weirdest of all. I just wanted to reverse the whole formula.” (The Arts Desk). There is no doubt Maddie is far less of an idiot than the PE teacher. When her ice cream arrives she says to Gregory “the nicest part is just before you taste it. Your mouth goes all tingly, but that can’t go on forever.” She then sucks into the straw. This is in contemporaneous terms mindfulness, and contrasts with the mindlessness of the PE teacher when he starts eating his lunch and manages to dip his whistle into the soup. 

    Comedy has sometimes been referred to as a utopian genre, like the musical. ND Smith notes “…two of the eleven [Aristophanes] comedies that have come down to us are dedicated specifically and systematically to Utopian schemes” (Utopian Studies), while Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness explores the green world Northrop Frye sees in Shakespearean comedies to show how it manifests itself in screwball films of the thirties and forties: an often Edenic milieu that suggests hope. Forsyth sees comedy as an oddly revolutionary genre or at least progressive: women can play football if they like; young children can offer the wisdom of their elders in an inversion of the idea that children should be seen and not heard (they should be actively listened to), and if a young man wishes to focus his mind on cooking he can become the kingmaker as well as the cake maker in the school.  

  Yet perhaps nothing is more transformative in Gregory’s Girl than the location that Forsyth insists on seeing as a manifold community. One of the problems with post-war architectural projects was the optimism of the architects, and the prompt pessimism of filmmakers when using these environments. Most films showing post-war housing developments lean towards the pessimistic; sometimes the dystopian, as we have noted with A Clockwork Orange and Bloody Kids. Often it is merely miserable and poverty-strewn: Red Road, Meantime, Raining Stones, Nil By Mouth, Rita Sue and Bob Too. Asked why he chose Cumbernauld, Forsyth reckoned: he was reacting against the way “…Glasgow is or was portrayed in endless social documentaries and TV plays. So it was a deliberate attempt to show a different face to Scotland or Glasgow, and Cumbernauld is a satellite of Glasgow.” (The Arts Desk). “Another reason”, he adds, “was because the film was about adolescence and about being young and the pains of growing. I thought to myself, why don’t we set the film in an adolescent town? I remember saying to someone, "Even the trees in Cumbernauld are teenagers so everything fits.” (The Arts Desk). This didn’t mean he was any the less political than those making bleak works (though he was far less vocal than Ken Loach and Mike Leigh); more that he was political in a different way -- seeing the value of working-class life as a community not devastated but reinvigorated. While Loach and Leigh often astutely showed how working-class people were put down, Forsyth turned representation inside out and offered an identitarian hope that we can look back on and see has come to pass in the popularity of women’s football, in the idea that there need be nothing intrinsically feminine about a man’s interest in cooking, and where the young for good and ill can sort out older people’s problems, especially when it comes to the intricacies of technology.

    One way of looking at the film is through the question of sense and sensuality. Maddie knows how to savour an ice cream and Steve can speak of the specifics of Chioux pastry as he distinguishes between short-crust, flaky and rough puff. It might be the one who turns out to be Gregory’s girl, Susan (Claire Grogan) who doesn’t know the rough from the smooth, but she can laugh with Gregory near the end of the film when joking about the fetishisation of numbers. Gregory offers one of his own, telling Susan that “we are clinging to the surface of this planet while it spins through space at a thousand miles an hour, held only by the mysterious force called gravity." Forsyth gives us about the only conspicuous camera shot in the whole film as it tilts on its axis to suggest the precarious nature of a gravitational force. Moments later, Susan asks why boys are obsessed with numbers and after Gregory’s insistence they are not, along comes the school’s budding photographer happy to talk tech specifications. He has a “400 mm lens, opens up to 2.8…1.5 stops.” Earlier, Gregory and others are discussing the window cleaner’s prowess — a boy, Billy, who left school the previous year and has had to wash 84 windows to pay for his cream blazer and adds he has had sex “11 times.” Forsyth would probably suggest he should focus on quality over quantity, and that might just happen if he has his way with his former English teacher, who seems to be drawn to his cheeky humour when he cleans the classroom window. She sounds exactly like one of those women at the private houses he speaks of as desiring him.

    In such moments this most forward-thinking of films can seem a bit antediluvian. It is perhaps a consequence of its moment and the yen for sex comedies during the seventies and early eighties. When Billy says women go mad for those washing windows, many a viewer would have had in mind Confessions of a Window Cleaner, a low-grade sex comedy that was the most successful film at the British box office in 1974, and was followed by three sequels. In the US, Animal House came out in 1978, and has a voyeuristic scene with central character Bluto watching a woman undress, leading to numerous instances in 80s cinema of characters spying on women in showers, in bedrooms and so on. Few films escape their moment and we might also notice in the film’s lovely theme tune that it nevertheless makes us well aware of the ubiquitous presence of the saxophone: there weren’t just sex comedies but sax dramas aplenty in the early to mid-eighties (Night Shift, Tootsie, Beverly Hills Cop), with only the occasion film like Betty Blue using the saxophone with evocation over by-the-yard instrumentalisation.   

    Forsyth was never an innovative filmmaker but he was an original one; a director who could take the twee and turn it into prescient insight. He might have been in some ways reflecting the mood of the times, but he was also capable of anticipating a few assumptions of our own era. Forsyth has been semi-retired for some years now, and a sequel in the early 2000s wasn’t successful, as though Forsyth’s purpose was to take the architectural optimism of the post-war years and find a comedic frame in which to place it. He would do something similar a couple of years after Gregory’s Girl with Local Hero. Here Fosyth takes the story of an oil-industry development and turns it into one of environmental purposefulness as a planned refinery in a beautiful village will become an observatory, all the better to look at the magnificence of the Scottish sky. The locals and the Texan oil company want a refinery but when the head honcho comes to Scotland he sees the possibility of refinement, of seeing the coastline as an opportunity to dream large without an economic imperative. 

     Forsyth was dreaming large but filming small, and he remains an important reminder of how Scottish film had briefly a filmmaker who could show the country in a positive light and with a mellow light evident in the cinematography in both Gregory's Girl and Local Hero. While another Bill (Bill Douglas) was brilliantly pessimistic about the country in his Trilogy; Forsyth gave an honest credence to the positive, without at all feeling like a filmmaker whose purpose was to serve the needs of a tourist industry that can get by well enough on its own. His vision was too singular for that. 

          

     

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Gregory's Girl

  Comedy is often based on contradicting assumptions and expectations. An apparent idiot proves cleverer than the well-educated; the woman proves stronger than the man; the lowly worker knows better how to run the business than the CEO. In Gregory’s Girl, Bill Forsyth shows a working-class town as idyllic, a female footballer as better than the blokes, and that wisdom is often best found in the very young. The film was shot in Cumbernauld, one of five Scottish New Towns built after the war. They may have been produced out of post-war optimism and a house-building boom, but these were not luxurious homes: they were pragmatic improvements over the places many would have left. The towns were built to counter the overcrowding in city centre areas like the Gorbals, and if working folk were no longer inside the city, they did at least have inside loos. This could seem a surprising luxury: “By 1970, man had landed on the moon, yet one in four Scots still had to share an outdoor toilet.” (BBC) The New Towns had indoor plumbing and if much comedy has been predicated on toilet humour, part of the low-key utopia of Forsyth’s vision is that here he shows us houses that are fully fitted homes, no matter their modest size and their uniform look. 

      Many a film has taken a new town environment and played up the despondency, whether it be A Clockwork Orange and Thamesmead, or Bloody Kids and Stevenage. The English New Town became equated with post-war architecture more generally, and concrete connoted gloom. Forsyth resists the despair and points up the municipal: here is an environment with a strong sense of community (even if it often manifests itself in gossip), a school with ample playing fields and classes where cookery is open to boys and girls. Forsyth uses the Cumbernauld environment to show old verities dying and new possibilities becoming available. It is partly why the young become the wise: in a society trying to evolve, ancient wisdom can seem like needless bigotry. Even the fifteen-year-old central character Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) appears a fogey: when his younger sister’s friend comes round to the house looking for Maddie, Gregory tells him to get lost: “you’re talking of my sister and she doesn’t go with walks with anybody… Act your age. Go and break some windows, demolish some phone boxes. Underage walks, dates. You’ll run out of vices before your twelve if you don’t slow down.” The film also has two first-year boys who seem so much more in the know than the fourth years and the teachers. At the beginning of the film, Gregory and his mates are staring from behind a tree at a nurse getting undressed next to the window. She takes off her bra and they are overwhelmed; happy, they retreat from the scene. After they’ve left, the first-years appear and say to each other “all that fuss over a bit of tit, eh”, while noticing that she is now removing her knickers too. Later, a first-year advises another kid in the school canteen not to touch the ravioli, it is garbage. The PE teacher appears just afterwards and takes the pasta option. Age does not bestow wisdom, though the impression of hierarchy must be maintained. When the school’s cookery whizkid Steve visits the headmaster (Chic Murray), it is to discuss baking as we see a meeting of equals. When the boy leaves the office and the PE teacher waits outside, the head turns officious and authoritarian. Steve plays along but the film shows the head clumsily wiping away the crumbs from a choux pastry like a boy found out. 

     Forsyth’s take is that new towns demand new thinking, and who better to do much of it than the very young? Maddie is probably the film’s youngest and yet wisest character. As she says to her friend, she has to go up to the big school: there is family trouble; Gregory has fallen in love. She offers it with the rueful awareness that she has seen it all before even if she will later say to her brother, when he asks her what she dreams about, that she dreams of ginger beer and ice cream. As she says: “I’m still a little girl remember.” She is so self-aware that she can even acknowledge how un-grown up she is. 

       The New Town environment allows the housing boom to meet the baby boom. When Gregory walks out of his home, a tracking shot shows him almost tripping up over child after child. Gregory’s mother is never seen and his father has a brief role as a driving instructor whose client (whose name the father gets wrong) almost runs Gregory over. The whole film shows a youth environment where the older generation are interlopers and, while this might indicate ageism, in Forsyth’s vision, it suggests hope: a vision of the future cannot be contained in the bodies of the old and must be observed in the aspirations of the young. In Forsyth’s take it might be comedic to show kids running the show or full of know-how, but this is where Forsyth’s optimism is at its most utopian. If George Bernard Shaw reputedly said youth is wasted on the young, then Forsyth thinks it needn’t be so, and where better than a New Town environment to make such a claim? If the future resides in youth, then how to resolve the conundrum of a world belonging to the young but where they are deemed incapable of the wisdom needed to live fully in it? 

     Forsyth proposes that comedy can help us solve this problem by reversing expectations, as he says, “even with the teachers in the staff room – they’re more like giggling kids than the kids are. And of course the headmaster is the weirdest of all. I just wanted to reverse the whole formula.” (The Arts Desk). There is no doubt Maddie is far less of an idiot than the PE teacher. When her ice cream arrives she says to Gregory “the nicest part is just before you taste it. Your mouth goes all tingly, but that can’t go on forever.” She then sucks into the straw. This is in contemporaneous terms mindfulness, and contrasts with the mindlessness of the PE teacher when he starts eating his lunch and manages to dip his whistle into the soup. 

    Comedy has sometimes been referred to as a utopian genre, like the musical. ND Smith notes “…two of the eleven [Aristophanes] comedies that have come down to us are dedicated specifically and systematically to Utopian schemes” (Utopian Studies), while Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness explores the green world Northrop Frye sees in Shakespearean comedies to show how it manifests itself in screwball films of the thirties and forties: an often Edenic milieu that suggests hope. Forsyth sees comedy as an oddly revolutionary genre or at least progressive: women can play football if they like; young children can offer the wisdom of their elders in an inversion of the idea that children should be seen and not heard (they should be actively listened to), and if a young man wishes to focus his mind on cooking he can become the kingmaker as well as the cake maker in the school.  

  Yet perhaps nothing is more transformative in Gregory’s Girl than the location that Forsyth insists on seeing as a manifold community. One of the problems with post-war architectural projects was the optimism of the architects, and the prompt pessimism of filmmakers when using these environments. Most films showing post-war housing developments lean towards the pessimistic; sometimes the dystopian, as we have noted with A Clockwork Orange and Bloody Kids. Often it is merely miserable and poverty-strewn: Red Road, Meantime, Raining Stones, Nil By Mouth, Rita Sue and Bob Too. Asked why he chose Cumbernauld, Forsyth reckoned: he was reacting against the way “…Glasgow is or was portrayed in endless social documentaries and TV plays. So it was a deliberate attempt to show a different face to Scotland or Glasgow, and Cumbernauld is a satellite of Glasgow.” (The Arts Desk). “Another reason”, he adds, “was because the film was about adolescence and about being young and the pains of growing. I thought to myself, why don’t we set the film in an adolescent town? I remember saying to someone, "Even the trees in Cumbernauld are teenagers so everything fits.” (The Arts Desk). This didn’t mean he was any the less political than those making bleak works (though he was far less vocal than Ken Loach and Mike Leigh); more that he was political in a different way -- seeing the value of working-class life as a community not devastated but reinvigorated. While Loach and Leigh often astutely showed how working-class people were put down, Forsyth turned representation inside out and offered an identitarian hope that we can look back on and see has come to pass in the popularity of women’s football, in the idea that there need be nothing intrinsically feminine about a man’s interest in cooking, and where the young for good and ill can sort out older people’s problems, especially when it comes to the intricacies of technology.

    One way of looking at the film is through the question of sense and sensuality. Maddie knows how to savour an ice cream and Steve can speak of the specifics of Chioux pastry as he distinguishes between short-crust, flaky and rough puff. It might be the one who turns out to be Gregory’s girl, Susan (Claire Grogan) who doesn’t know the rough from the smooth, but she can laugh with Gregory near the end of the film when joking about the fetishisation of numbers. Gregory offers one of his own, telling Susan that “we are clinging to the surface of this planet while it spins through space at a thousand miles an hour, held only by the mysterious force called gravity." Forsyth gives us about the only conspicuous camera shot in the whole film as it tilts on its axis to suggest the precarious nature of a gravitational force. Moments later, Susan asks why boys are obsessed with numbers and after Gregory’s insistence they are not, along comes the school’s budding photographer happy to talk tech specifications. He has a “400 mm lens, opens up to 2.8…1.5 stops.” Earlier, Gregory and others are discussing the window cleaner’s prowess — a boy, Billy, who left school the previous year and has had to wash 84 windows to pay for his cream blazer and adds he has had sex “11 times.” Forsyth would probably suggest he should focus on quality over quantity, and that might just happen if he has his way with his former English teacher, who seems to be drawn to his cheeky humour when he cleans the classroom window. She sounds exactly like one of those women at the private houses he speaks of as desiring him.

    In such moments this most forward-thinking of films can seem a bit antediluvian. It is perhaps a consequence of its moment and the yen for sex comedies during the seventies and early eighties. When Billy says women go mad for those washing windows, many a viewer would have had in mind Confessions of a Window Cleaner, a low-grade sex comedy that was the most successful film at the British box office in 1974, and was followed by three sequels. In the US, Animal House came out in 1978, and has a voyeuristic scene with central character Bluto watching a woman undress, leading to numerous instances in 80s cinema of characters spying on women in showers, in bedrooms and so on. Few films escape their moment and we might also notice in the film’s lovely theme tune that it nevertheless makes us well aware of the ubiquitous presence of the saxophone: there weren’t just sex comedies but sax dramas aplenty in the early to mid-eighties (Night Shift, Tootsie, Beverly Hills Cop), with only the occasion film like Betty Blue using the saxophone with evocation over by-the-yard instrumentalisation.   

    Forsyth was never an innovative filmmaker but he was an original one; a director who could take the twee and turn it into prescient insight. He might have been in some ways reflecting the mood of the times, but he was also capable of anticipating a few assumptions of our own era. Forsyth has been semi-retired for some years now, and a sequel in the early 2000s wasn’t successful, as though Forsyth’s purpose was to take the architectural optimism of the post-war years and find a comedic frame in which to place it. He would do something similar a couple of years after Gregory’s Girl with Local Hero. Here Fosyth takes the story of an oil-industry development and turns it into one of environmental purposefulness as a planned refinery in a beautiful village will become an observatory, all the better to look at the magnificence of the Scottish sky. The locals and the Texan oil company want a refinery but when the head honcho comes to Scotland he sees the possibility of refinement, of seeing the coastline as an opportunity to dream large without an economic imperative. 

     Forsyth was dreaming large but filming small, and he remains an important reminder of how Scottish film had briefly a filmmaker who could show the country in a positive light and with a mellow light evident in the cinematography in both Gregory's Girl and Local Hero. While another Bill (Bill Douglas) was brilliantly pessimistic about the country in his Trilogy; Forsyth gave an honest credence to the positive, without at all feeling like a filmmaker whose purpose was to serve the needs of a tourist industry that can get by well enough on its own. His vision was too singular for that. 

          

     


© Tony McKibbin