Director Mike Leigh with Ruth Sheen and Phil Davies

I wanted to stop watching this halfway through: the awful sister, her awful husband and the awful neighbours were just too awful. “Over-acting” didn’t begin to cover it. But I didn’t – and I’m glad. It was an interesting, funny film that brought back memories of London in the 1980s, the feel of “Thatcher’s Britain” with its yuppies and Sloane Rangers and how quickly life was changing. Also life without central heating and what 70 looked like before hair dye and skin-care routines became commonplace.. A bit of place nostalgia too: the opening shot was of King’s Cross/St Pancras and moved round the corner to the many streets of (ex-) council housing that started life as 19th-century “improved dwellings”; once again I was cycling from Euston along the Caledonian Road towards Finsbury Park.

The film centres on a couple – Cyril and Shirley – and his family. He is a Marxist motorcycle courier (ironically, one of the jobs that boomed during those years), pessimistic about the state of the world. Shirley wants to have a child despite Cyril’s refusal. They are essentially kind people – offering a bed to a hapless stranger, bearing with Cyril’s declining mother. They are the modern working-class but increasingly denied the social structures of the earlier working classes: no union, less social housing, little concept of neighbourliness. His sister and her husband have fully embraced the aspirational life; his mother’s neighbours were born into it. Nothing much happens: his mother gets locked out of her house, they visit Marx’s tomb, his mother has a horrible birthday party – and Cyril stops objecting to having a child. A very small hope comes to life, a little flicker of optimism that this time the family will be a happy one and that life will improve.

As for the excruciatingly awful characters: it was suggested afterwards that I should think of Charles Dickens – and suddenly everything made sense! Instead of diagnosing over-acting, I saw Lady Tippens and Sir Mulberry Hawk and Mr Mantalini. I remembered the building of the railway in Dombey & Son was near here; Mike Leigh didn’t just take me back to the 1980s; he also traced a line all the way back to the mid-19th century.