Ken Loach is Britain's most renowned and controversial director of socially conscious television drama. He is also an internationally acclaimed director of feature films whose radical political messages consistently provoke strong responses in audiences and politicians alike. In 1965 he received the British Television Guild's TV Director of the Year Award, while the 1990s brought prizes and nominations at the Cannes Film Festival. His considerable body of work, documenting British society since the 1960s, is an acknowledged source of inspiration to his contemporaries.

     Loach worked for a brief spell as a repertory actor before joining the BBC in 1963 as a trainee television director. Significantly, this was during the progressive director-generalship of Sir Hugh Greene and coincided with Sydney Newman's influential appointment as head of BBC drama. Loach's earliest directorial contribution was on episodes of the ground-breaking police series Z Cars, but he first attracted serious attention with Up the Junction, a starkly realistic portrayal of working-class life in south London, which in 1965 was one of the earliest productions in the BBC's innovative Wednesday Play slot. This success marked the beginning of a long and fertile creative collaboration with story editor and producer Tony Garnett, which led to the recognition of their particular mode of documentary drama as the "Loach-Garnett" style. It also positioned Loach as an exponent of television's foray into the "social realist" British New Wave, popular in film, theater, and novels.

     Loach collaborated with Garnett on a number of other celebrated Wednesday Play productions, including David Mercer's famous play about schizophrenia, In Two Minds (1967), which Loach later made into a feature film, Family Life (1971), and two significant industrial drama-documentaries written by ex-coal miner Jim Allen: The Big Flame (1969) and The Rank and File (1971). These productions demonstrated Loach's passionate concern to ignore theatrical artificiality in favor of authentic dramas on topical, important issues-dramas that give a voice to politically marginalized sections of society. By far the most powerful work from this period of Loach's career, however, is Cathy Come Home (1966), a study of the effects of homelessness and bureaucracy on family life. This remains one of the most seminal program events in the history of British television.

     Cathy Come Home, written by former journalist Jeremy Sandford, exploded with tremendous force upon the complacent, affluent, post-Beatles culture of the Swinging Sixties. Drawing attention to disturbing levels of social deprivation far in excess of those claimed by the government, the play led to a public outcry, questions in Parliament, the establishment of the housing charity Shelter, and a relaxation of policy on the dissolution of homeless families. Reflecting years afterward on this succes de scandale, Loach explained that, though he may have believed at the time in the potential of television drama for effecting social change, he had subsequently come to realize it could do nothing more than provide a social critique, promoting awareness of problems capable of resolution only through political action.

     It was not only the subject matter of Cathy, and of Loach's television work generally, that struck contemporary audiences and critics as innovative; his chosen form and style were distinctive and provocative too. Above all, he was concerned to capture a sense of the real, extending a range of practiced cinema-verite techniques to produce a sense of immediacy and plausibility that would in tum produce recognition in the spectator and inspire collective action. Lightweight, handheld camera; grainy 16mm film stock; a black­ and-white aesthetic; location shooting; natural lighting; direct, asynchronous sound; blending of experienced and nonprofessional performers; authentic regional accents and dialects; overlapping dialogue; improvised acting; expressive editing; incorporation of statistical information: all these strategies combined in varying degrees to create a compelling and original documentary effect markedly at odds with the look of traditional "acted" television drama.

     In 1975 the distinctive Loach-Garnett style was employed in a notable exploration, nearly 400 minutes in length, of British labor history, which functioned as a poignant commentary on the parlous state of contemporary industrial relations. This was the four-part BBC series Days of Hope, scripted by Jim Allen, which follows a northern British working-class family through the turbulent years of struggle from the end of World War I to the general strike of 1926. Loach, already subject to criticism for preferring the docudrama form (deemed reprehensible in some quarters for its potential confusion of fact and fiction), now found himself embroiled in an academic debate about the extent to which radical television drama, using the conventions of bourgeois realism, could be truly "progressive." Loach insisted that his priority was populist political discourse rather than a rarefied aesthetic debate of interest only to a critical elite. In other words, Days of Hope and the other strike dramas that preceded it were intended to open the eyes of ordinary people to the emancipatory potential of free collective bargaining within any capitalist culture.

     Loach made his first feature film, Poor Cow, at the height of his television fame in 1967. He became a major founding partner, with Tony Gamet, of the independent production company, Kestrel Films, for which he made half a dozen low-budget films between 1969 and 1986. His first project at Kestrel Films was Kes, a moving story of a young boy and his pet kestrel set against a bleak northern industrial landscape. Some of the Kestrel Films projects were intended for television screening as well as limited theatrical release.

     The Thatcher years put Loach increasingly in conflict with those who took exception to the left-wing thrust of his work and wanted to censor it or lessen its impact. Finding it difficult to ensure transmission of the kind of television drama he considered important, he turned for a while almost exclusively to straight documentary, convinced that the nonfiction form could more speedily and directly address the key social and political questions of the day. If anything, however, this route led Loach into even greater problems with censorship, culminating in the controversial withdrawals of the four-part series Questions of Leadership (1983) and Which Side Are You On? (1984), a polemical documentary about the socially disruptive miners· strike. It was probably this unsavory experience, and the greater freedom afforded by cinema, that drove Loach away from television at the end of the 1980s.

The 1990s and beyond brought Ken Loach renewed success and established him as one of Britain's foremost film directors, albeit not of mainstream commercial films. Beginning with his political thriller about a military cover-up in Ulster, Hidden Agenda, which was reviled and praised in roughly equal measure on its first screening at Cannes, Loach has gone on to make roughly one feature film each year, usually with an early television showing in mind. These are, without exception, films of integrity that continue their direc­ tor's lifelong principle of bringing issues of oppression, inhumanity, and hypocrisy to the public's attention. The political content is, if anything, more foreground than in the earlier television work; the uncompromising focus on the disadvantaged or voiceless sections of society remains the same. Though he made brief return to the television drama-documentary genre in 1997 with The Flickering Flame (about a strike by Liverpool dock workers) and in 2001 with The Navigators (about the chaotic aftermath of rail privatization in Britain:, Loach continues to reserve his creative energies chiefly for cinema. After a lifetime of eschewing filming in the United States, he relented in 2000 with Bread and Roses, a typical Loach vehicle about a strike by non­ unionized janitors in Los Angeles.