Richard Billingham didn’t take a photograph until he was 19. That was 25 years ago, when he was living with his alcoholic father, Ray, in a flat on the seventh floor of a council block in Cradley Heath in the Black Country, west of Birmingham. He’d just begun an art foundation course at Bournville College and was working every night to pay his way stacking shelves at the local Kwik Save supermarket.
The first pictures he took, with a camera bought on credit after he persuaded the shop assistant he was a librarian, were of geese and ducks in the park, “just to see if they would come out”. He then trained his viewfinder on Ray.
“I had never had a camera before that,” he says. “My parents maybe had, like, a 110 pocket camera once, but it was always too expensive to develop the films. Those pictures I took of my dad were quite rare too. I took time over each one, probably only took 10 rolls that year.”
What did Ray make of them?
“I don’t think he took any notice,” Billingham says. “Or if he did it was probably that he was pleased I was in the room with him. The camera acted as a mediator.”
Ray was lonely?
“Liz [Billingham’s mother] had moved out a year earlier. Ray never left his bedroom, except to go to the toilet. He would spend all day looking out of the window or listening to the radio. And drinking.”
Originally, Billingham thought that he would use his pictures as studies for art school paintings, but he never finished any. The photos themselves always seemed more real. A year or two later, Liz [he rarely calls his parents Mum and Dad] moved back into the flat along with her many cats and dogs. Billingham had gone up to Sunderland University to take a degree by this time, but he continued to take pictures at home and they began to take on a vivid life of their own.
Eventually, the photographs were shown in galleries, after being “discovered” by Billingham’s Sunderland tutor in plastic bags in his student room. Ray and Liz, the overexposed detail of their lives – Ray, toothless, shirtless and swigging from his pop bottles of homebrew, vast Liz in her raucous patterned frocks poring over her 1,000-piece jigsaws, surrounded by knick-knacks and wild-looking animals, fag in hand, the pair of them on a raddled sofa with their lurid TV dinners – became as individual and indicative of their time and place as Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews or David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.
Billingham’s book of the photos Ray’s a Laugh was taken to have invented a squalid realism. His pictures, surreal, claustrophobic, gave meaning to the idea of “too close to home”. When Charles Saatchi bought some and they were included alongside the more manufactured shocks in the YBA Sensation show of 1997, they were easily the most truthful and affecting things on display. In 1998, there was a BBC2 documentary, Fishtank, commissioned by Adam Curtis, which saw Billingham revisit his parents’ chaotic life with a handheld camera. In 2001, he was shortlisted for the Turner prize. Ray and Liz, in photo and video, subsequently toured the world without ever leaving Cradley Heath.
Billingham recalled some of this history for me last week in a favourite little cafe, just down the road from that council block where he lived as a teenager. He’s based in Swansea these days, where he lives with his partner – it’s her home town — and their three children, aged one, seven and nine, but he comes up here any chance he can. “It’s like a holiday,” he says, with a smile. Ray and Liz both died nearly a decade ago, but they have never really gone away for him.
He has been thinking a lot in particular about those first pictures of Ray, because they form the basis of a feature film he is trying to get made – there’s an ongoing Kickstarter campaign – which he hopes might yet be his last word on the subject.
Also with us in the cafe are Jacqui Davies, the film’s producer, here to scout locations, and Dee Kelly, “White Dee” from the voyeuristic Channel 4 series Benefits Street (and a subsequent couple of seasons in Celebrity Big Brother). Dee will play Liz in the film. Billingham is tucking into a £2.95 roast dinner and trying to explain what it’s all going to be about.
He’s a likably diffident presence, finding the laugh in things and policing any hint of pretension. My own mother grew up in a council house only a mile or so from this cafe and I recognise from childhood exactly the rooted quickness of that sensibility. Black Country people are bluntly amused by the inauthentic airs of Brummies, let alone adoptive Londoners.
It’s odd, given this, that Billingham has found a home for himself in the art world; it is a disjunction he has made sense of by keeping on nagging at those insular beginnings. I ask him, inevitably, why he wanted to return to his first God-given subject for this film – he has been working for the past decade or so mostly on landscapes or taking photos of his own young family. He has a go at talking about the motivation in conventional terms but his heart isn’t quite in it.
“I guess just because I was carrying it around, still,” he says. “It was a way of externalising.” There’s a more down to earth reason too. “I always assumed at school I couldn’t write. But I got these two professorships recently” – he teaches art at Gloucester and Middlesex universities — “and they gave me a laptop. I’d never had a laptop before.” It was a bit like the first time he had a camera. “I just started to write this script,” he says. “I could cut and paste. I did one scene and then another.”
The film is planned in three acts. The first part, a 30-minute film, Ray, is already done – there was a screening at the BFI in February (a trailer is available on Vimeo). In tone, it is pitched somewhere between Samuel Beckett and Alan Bleasdale. The camera dwells, unflinching, on Ray (played by hollow-cheeked Patrick Romer), just as Billingham used to, forcing himself to look. “I wanted to portray the sort of time experienced by a zoo animal or a prisoner,” he says. “Ray could go to sleep or wake up at any time – seven in the morning, seven at night – or whatever.” The days are punctuated only by the delivery of more homebrew from a neighbour and a visit from Liz (Dee, foul mouthed and in a curly wig). It is, as with the photographs, hard to look away.
Billingham later sends me the scripts for the other two parts of the film. One examines a long-lost family story from about 1980. Billingham’s baby brother, Jason, is left by Ray and Liz in the care of his feckless Uncle Lol for an afternoon; Lol gets blind drunk. In the other, five or ten years later, Jason is growing up, left to his own devices, tipping chilli powder in Ray’s mouth while he sleeps, scavenging for food. He goes missing for three days and when the school asks where he is Ray and Liz haven’t a clue. The police get involved and he is found sleeping in someone’s shed.
What happened to Ray and Liz after his last pictures of them?
“In 2003, Ray got moved into an old people’s home up the road,” he says. “At first, Liz would go and see him once a day, then it was once a week, then once a month, then months went by. She died about three years after that. Of a blood clot, at 56. And then he died the year after. He was 74. Not much of a story really.”
I wonder how important it is to Billingham that the past is presented precisely accurately in the film.
“We rented a flat in the same block of flats, on the same floor,” he says. “We used the photographs to reconstruct the wallpaper and the furniture. I wanted to go back to that, where every detail in the room is telling the story. It was important that the actors looked and behaved like Ray and Liz.”
They decided on inviting Dee to play the part when Jacqui Davies saw a picture of her going into the Big Brother house dressed up in a ballgown as “the Duchess of Solihull”, to fool the resident American housemates into thinking she was posh. Davies immediately texted that picture to Richard, saying “Liz!”, but they had to wait four weeks before Dee was evicted from the house before they could ask if she was interested. They met up in a drive-through McDonald’s in Birmingham’s Bristol Road and immediately hit it off. I wonder what Dee thought when she looked at Richard’s pictures of his mother.
“Well, to be honest, I thought she was opposite to me really, the big curly hair and the bright lipstick,” she says. “Smoking we had in common. And the loud brashness I suppose. Anyway, I thought: I‘ll give it a go.”
You could no doubt write a sociology thesis about the progression from Ray’s a Laugh to Benefits Street, a study of the depiction of poverty in British culture and the ethics of intrusion. At least, it’s hard to imagine some of the extremes of reality TV without first having had the more complex intimacies of Billingham’s art. What did he make of the series?
“When I saw Dee on the telly, she came over as honest,” he says. “She looked after people. Usually when you watch people on telly you see their outer life. But Dee was like an open book.”
Dee is throatily ambivalent about the series, which boiled down 18 months of fly on the wall filming into 10 episodes; it has certainly changed her life, not always for the better. She fields calls from the Birmingham Mail while we talk; there’s a story running about her having Botox in order to get a part in Benidorm. “The thing is, we are honest people,” she says of her friends and neighbours. “What you see is what you get. Even the lad who was doing the shoplifting. He was very honest that he was shoplifting.”
Does she still live in James Turner – Benefits – Street?
“No, it became a bit crazy after the series came out,” she says. “I had people climbing in through my front windows. Nice people usually. But you don’t really want strangers climbing in through your window to say ‘hello’ because you are sick of opening the door.”
They were fans?
“Yes. It was really weird. I mean I like a lot of people on telly, but I would never actually climb in to their front room.”
Did she mind the “Benefits Street” tag?
“We had no idea it was going to be called that. I won’t watch anything with ‘benefits’ or ‘immigration’ in the title because I think that immediately belittles the people in them. As soon as I heard the title, I thought, ‘We are well and truly screwed here’.” She laughs loudly. “But by then it was too late.”
We talk about the line between exploitation and documentary; did Billingham worry about crossing it when he photographed his family?
“Not really. That’s why you put them in a gallery,” he says. “You frame them in a certain way to allow a particular reading of them. But now you have the internet, the pictures are all there out of context…”
Does that bother him?
“With the photographs I tried to make them as truthful as I could and hopefully that element overcomes any exploitative element,” he says. “I think there was a warmth to them.”
Talking to Billingham you can’t help but wonder how he saw a way of making the riotous mundanity of his family into art. It’s one thing, as in Benefits Street, to have a film crew from outside looking in; it’s another to be able to frame your own life. He talks a bit about “objectifying my situation” and catharsis, but the best answer he gives is really when he describes how they came to be in the flat itself. He could see that life for what it was, because it had a before and after.
While they are contrasting childhoods, Dee talks about how supportive her parents were, how much she loved her growing up.
Billingham interrupts to say: “But I did, too! Until the point where Ray lost his job as a machinist and we moved into the flats in about 1980. We were in this little terraced house before that. My parents did not know how to budget. The factories were all closing and he got made redundant. And the redundancy money just went. They spent it at the pub or they would buy something and someone would come in and steal it. They lost track of everything somehow.”
And the drinking started?
“He always drank. But before then only in the pub, like everyone else. I know it sounds strange but really it was because my dad did not know how to fill in a form, he could write, but he had never had to fill in forms. So he didn’t sign on for a long time. After six months, we had no food in the fridge. He met someone, a conman, and he said, ‘I’ll give you two grand for the house.’ Ray and Liz took it because we were literally starving. We got moved into these flats. Living in the terraced house was nice. We had an outside toilet and that, but we kids would play in the street, we had a little garden out the back. But when we moved to the tower block you didn’t play out much. You’d get beaten up or have a brick thrown at you. In the lifts and in the corridors it was covered in graffiti, mostly racist. You constantly felt tense.”
The photographs were an attempt to release that tension or to capture it. Does it make him angry, looking back, now that he is a father himself, that Ray and Liz were so hopeless?
“If anything it makes me less angry,” he says. “More sympathetic. I don’t really blame them, I blame the con-man. But then if he hadn’t have done it someone else would.”
But there was a weakness there in Ray and Liz that he must have hated, when his brother was taken into care and so on?
“No,” he says. “A vulnerability. I just hated growing up in that tower block. I didn’t like being unable to walk out of the door. You had to get in the lift and people would piss and shit in the lift and spit on the walls. You had to be careful never to lean on anything.”
When we have finished in the cafe, we drive up to the old block of flats where Richard grew up and where he and Dee have been filming. There is still a sort of unplanned brutality to them, but they have been tarted up. The car park is full of newish cars. You need a security code to get in. We squash together in the lift, so he can go up and have his photograph taken on the seventh floor. Billingham points out that you no longer have to avoid leaning on the walls, there is no graffiti, the smell has gone. He can laugh about it all, but you have the sense that he still sees a good deal more in the repainted corridors and hallways than the rest of us.
Later, he gives me a lift back to Cradley Heath station. We stop on the way outside the little terraced house his parents sold for next to nothing in order to eat (and drink). I’m reminded of that old line about bankruptcy: “It happened two ways: gradually, then suddenly” and think the same could be said of Billingham becoming an artist.
He comes over a bit nostalgic, describing a world that ended abruptly in about 1979, or different kinds of photographs altogether: “We’d play cricket in the road. Be in and out of everyone’s houses. My school was at the end there and the library where I spent half my life. It’s like these terraces evolved from the landscape.”
The few intact streets now give on to the biggest Tesco I’ve ever seen. Billingham registers its impact: “I went round the old market where Ray and Liz used to go this morning; there are probably six or seven stalls left and the people aren’t even on those. You could have stolen all the stuff. It is like they have given up. The high street is just pound shops, takeaways, charity shops, bookies. The pubs are mostly closed. People go to these off-licences and get three litres of Frosty Jack’s [cider] for £1.99.”
He still loves it here, though, he says, partly because he has a memory of what home was, partly because he wants to look hard still at what it became.
“I come back with any excuse. I just like spending time here. It’s funny,” he says. “I was in this little caff the other week eating a pork sandwich, and the usual people are walking past, the same people you always see, old people with sticks and that. And all of a sudden this young girl with an SLR camera appeared out of nowhere and started photographing the shopfront I’m sitting in. I couldn’t help smiling. I thought: someone is still alert to the life of this area. It was nice to see someone else trying to document it, not just passing by.”
For more details about Richard Billingham’s film Ray and Liz and how to get involved see kickstarter.com/projects/68852125/ray-and-liz
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