Home Sweet Home is a 1982 television film devised and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh

Michael "Mike" Leigh, OBE is a British writer and director of film and theatre. He studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and studied further at the Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid 1960s...

, for BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 TV, 'about postmen, parenthood, social workers and sex.' It was Leigh's second collaboration with Play for Today

Play for Today

Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted...

producer Louis Marks

Louis Marks

Louis Frank Marks was a British script writer and producer mainly for the BBC. He attended the Balliol College, Oxford and graduated with a DPhil. He made the surprising choice to become a writer...

, and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin

Remi Adefarasin

Remi Adefarasin, B.S.C., , London) is a noted British cinematographer. He is educated in Photography & Filmmaking at Harrow Art School. Started his career as camera trainee at BBC-tv's Ealing Studios...

, (after Grown-Ups

Grown-Ups

Grown-Ups is a 1980 British BBC television film devised and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars Lesley Manville, Philip Davis, Brenda Blethyn, Janine Duvitski, Lindsay Duncan and Sam Kelly...

), and with composer Carl Davis

Carl Davis

Carl Davis CBE is an American born conductor and composer who has made his home in the UK since 1961. In 1970 he married the English actress Jean Boht....

 - the music score featured a quartet of basses - (Davis had also provided the music for 1977s The Kiss of Death). It stars Timothy Spall

Timothy Spall

Timothy Leonard Spall, OBE is an English character actor and occasional presenter.-Early life:Spall, the third of four sons, was born in Battersea, London. His mother, Sylvia R. , was a hairdresser, and his father, Joseph L. Spall, was a postal worker...

, here working with Leigh for the first time, Eric Richard

Eric Richard

Eric Richard is an English actor.His theatre work includes plays at the Royal Court Theatre and the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, as well as seasons with the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Sheffield Crucible Theatre and Paines Plough...

, Tim Barker, Kay Stonham

Kay Stonham

Kay Stonham is a British actress and writer. She was a member of the regular cast of Jasper Carrott's BBC TV comedy sketch show Carrott's Lib in 1982. She graduated from Rose Bruford College in 1977. She co-created and co-wrote series one and two of the BBC Radio 4 series Robin and Wendy's Wet...

, Su Elliot, Frances Barber

Frances Barber

Frances Barber is an Olivier Award-nominated English actress with a long and distinguished stage career. She has also appeared in numerous television productions...

, Sheila Kelley, and Lorraine Brunning. It was first broadcast on 16 March 1982. The film was shot on location in Hitchin

Hitchin

Hitchin is a town in Hertfordshire, England, with an estimated population of 30,360.-History:Hitchin is first noted as the central place of the Hicce people mentioned in a 7th century document, the Tribal Hidage. The tribal name is Brittonic rather than Old English and derives from *siccā, meaning...

, Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...

. 90 minutes .

Synopsis

The story of three postmen; "Gordon Leach (Timothy Spall), a slothful couch potato who is in permanent dispute with his svelte wife Hazel (Kay Stonham), who has lost four stone," and who "is offering to entertain ... postman Stan (Eric Richard), when his shifts don't coincide with Gordon's." "Stan's wife ran off with another man when their daughter, Tina, was six. She is now fourteen. As the film progresses, Stan and his domestic arrangements assume a pivotal importance." The third postman Harold Fish (Tim Barker) and his wife June (Su Elliott), have a dead marriage. Stan is having an affair with June Fish.

Critical reception

Clive James

Clive James

Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...

, television critic of the Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

between 1972 and 1982, praised Leigh's film : "The gripping story of three postmen and how practically nothing happened to them,..if you can imagine Cosi fan tutte

Così fan tutte

Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti K. 588, is an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed in 1790. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte....

with the music taken out, and then with the words taken out, and then with all the decor and costumes replaced by the tackiest fabrics and furniture known to mortal man, you've got a movie by Mike Leigh. That there should be two such original artists as him and Bill Forsyth

Bill Forsyth

Bill Forsyth is a Scottish film director and writer, noted for his commitment to national film-making.Forsyth first came to attention with a low-budget film, That Sinking Feeling, made with youth theatre actors and featuring a cameo appearance by the Edinburgh gallery owner Richard Demarco...

 loose in Britain at the same time is a remarkable thing." The playwright David Edgar

David Edgar (playwright)

David Edgar is a British playwright and author who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain.He was resident playwright at the Birmingham...

 was critical, and wondered about Leigh's methods, and techniques, which produced " work of extraordinary, naturalistic perception; but it also appears to produce an attitude to the character of little more than rank contempt." Timothy Spall

Timothy Spall

Timothy Leonard Spall, OBE is an English character actor and occasional presenter.-Early life:Spall, the third of four sons, was born in Battersea, London. His mother, Sylvia R. , was a hairdresser, and his father, Joseph L. Spall, was a postal worker...

, (whose father was a postman, and thought the film 'pretty accurate') has said : "If you were to tell me you think Mike's patronising, I'd accuse him of the dead opposite: of elevating, and of making amusing and tragic, what most people in life go through."