Escaping the kitchen sink (with the help of some corporate sponsorship).

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By Alison Willmore on 08/14/2008

In the new issue of Sight & Sound, Mark Sinker makes a nice point about Shane Meadows' "Somers Town" and his rebellion in general against working class miserablism:

Kitchen Sink made speech and street into stifling prisons; for Meadows, protesting the obligatory disenchantments of a later age, they're often more like dreamscapes, to play with and against. In This Is England, the skinhead gang spent their happiest, freest day playing dress-up in cowboy hats and scuba masks, a brief carnival escape from community-imposed or subcultural tribal identity. Here Tommo, robbed and needing clothes, makes off with an old woman's laundry, and stoically pays the price.

Alan Connor at BBC News looks into the fact -- and either sign of the future or impending end times -- that the film was funded by Eurostar:

So who's getting what out of this "content marketing"? According to the participants, it's very much a model of good practice. Meadows (whose ads for Asda's school uniforms have just launched) gets the money to fund a movie; Eurostar gives something back to its new home; and audiences get a new piece of storytelling.
The actual benefits for Eurostar are hard to quantify, says Francesca Fisher, of ad industry magazine Campaign.

"Advertising works by making people feel warm inside about the brand. If Eurostar comes out of the film with a vague glow, it will have worked - but that's impossible to measure."

And Meadows is interviewed at the London Times, where they also report that his next film will be "his biggest project yet, King of the Gypsies, a story about the real-life bare-knuckle boxer Bartley Gorman."

[Photo: Thomas Turgoose in "Somers Town," Works International, 2008]