sausalito-93893

It's amazing how the drama is so clearly adumbrated by the serving and ordering of drinks, the discussion of drinks, the holding of drink receptacles, the type of drink, where it is drunk and by whom.

I wasn't expecting much from this when it came on TV and was half-watching while doing computer stuff but it pretty soon drew me in. The characters and their interactions were much more realistic than I expected and the acting was really good. Last night I watched World War Z a big budget 'zombie' film from 2013 starring Brad Pitt and it was really poor - Impulse is a far more mature and involving treatment of a broadly similar theme.

I grew up not far from the area in which this was filmed and to be honest that was about all there was to the film to hold my interest until the end. It looks like it was filmed in Easington, one of three coastal colliery villages along a 4 mile stretch of the East Durham coast. Easington was later the location for Billy Elliott and the blackened beach in front of the pit, visible at the end of the film, was used by the Who as the location for the cover shot of their album Who's Next. Also 'Tinker'' culminates in a brief action sequence filmed in and around what, as kids, we called the 'aerial buckets'. That setting is pretty much identical to that used for the final scenes in Get Carter though those particular 'aerial buckets' were 3-4 miles to the south at Blackhall. Miners in these coastal pits would often spend much of their working day at coal faces some miles out underneath the North Sea.

The main, perhaps only, fascination of the film is how much it takes for granted that it would be appropriate to send large numbers of boys in their early teens into what at that time would have been a particularly dangerous working environment. It is a sobering coincidence that, in 1951, only two years after this was made, an explosion at Easington killed 83 miners.

As for rating the film itself - well as a documentary it doesn't tell us much (not intentionally anyway).and as a drama it doesn't get off the ground, just sort of builds falteringly to a sort of climactic action scene. 5 out of 10 then for bravely putting a script in the hands of fairly rigid non-actors (sprinkled with what seem to be a couple of stage school kids) for what we can assume were the best of intentions. A failed experiment.