INTRODUCTION TO MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE

In the following weeks I will be publishing the script to My Beautiful Laundrette. Here is the introduction I wrote. Published by Faber and Faber in my collected essays.

I wrote the script of My Beautiful Laundrette in my uncle's house in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 1984, during the night. As I wrote, cocks crowed and the call to prayer reverberated through crackly speakers from a nearby mosque. It was impossible to sleep. One morning as I sat on the verandah having breakfast, I had a phone call from Howard Davies, a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom I'd worked twice before. He wanted to direct Brecht's Mother Courage, with Judi Dench in the lead role. He wanted me to adapt it.

That summer, back in England and at Howard's place in Stratford-upon-Avon, I sat in the orchard with two pads of paper in front of me: on one I rewrote My Beautiful Laundrette and on the other I adapted Brecht from a literal translation into language that could be spoken by the RSC actors.

As Laundrette was the first film I'd written, and I was primarily a playwright, I wrote each scene of the film like a little scene for a play, with the action written like stage directions and with lots of dialogue. Then I'd cut most of the dialogue and add more stage directions, often set in cars, or with people running about, to keep the thing moving, since films required action.

Id had a couple of lunches with Karin Bamborough of Channel 4. She wanted me to write something for Film on Four. I was extremely keen. For me Film on Four had taken over from the BBC's Play for Today in presenting serious contemporary drama on TV to a wide audience. The work of TV writers like Alan Bennett (much of it directed by Stephen Frears), Dennis Potter Harold Pinter, Alan Plater and David Mercer influenced me greatly when I was young and living at home in the suburbs. On my way up to London the morning after a Play for Today I’d sit in the train listening to people discussing the previous night's drama and interrupt them with my own opinions.