Come to Garston with the cast and crew of UNDER THE MUD

“The imaginary friend – is a real imaginary friend. One of the early writers established a
friend with her called Georgina. She’d come along to the meetings and we’d pull up a chair
for her… We had people like Jennifer Ellison and Liz from Atomic Kitten in mind to do that
voice”

Clearly, when director Sol Papadopoulo and producer Roy Boulter of UNDER THE MUD
set out to make a film they had some distinct ideas about what they wanted to make and
more specifically where they wanted to set it “We didn’t want to do a gritty, grim, Northern drama: it’s a poor area but it’s all the better for that in some ways”: Garston, Liverpool being the area in question.

UNDER THE MUD couldn’t be anywhere else in the entire world, anywhere else in England, and for that matter anywhere else in Liverpool. They could have chosen Liverpool generally, or even picked other places in town, such as Bootle or Birkenhead perhaps but they didn’t and this is to the great credit of the production. “Garston is cut in half and under the bridge is an area where the people are called mud men – that’s where the name of the film came from.”

If you are familiar with Liverpool everything that happens in the film conceivably happens
near and around the Garston area. Compare to one of Richard Harris’ last films MY KINGDOM (which also previously was shown at the Cambridge Film Festival in 2002) where the film crew shot scenes all around town. So when the characters in UNDER THE MUD go to the local airport or end up where the title suggests they might, it all carries a certain innate truth that other dramas can barely touch.

As Boulter describes, Garston can be a pretty grim place especially for the statisticians “… highest teenage pregnancy rate, one of the most deprived areas in Europe…”. But for all this it’s also a very convivial place, where family means a lot. One of several centrepieces has a family party in a social club complete with karaoke.
The scene smacks of a thousand other events that will be shudderingly, instantly recognisable for anyone who’s ever had do their own food for a party, where someone’s grandmother takes to the dance floor to the Arctic Monkeys followed by The Monkees.

Prepared over five years with young people, one night a few years ago Papadopoulo and
Boulter turned on the television and suddenly found that scriptwriter Paul Abbot had done something very different with SHAMELESS but something superficially similar. A particular raw point for the cast and crew of UNDER THE MUD, not least for the major differences between the productions and the traditional rivalries between Liverpool and Manchester.

Such comparisons may occur but will become swiftly forgotten by the whimsical touches of
magical realism that spontaneously occur in UNDER THE MUD – moments where a church congregation jive to the lead’s MP3 player, or the beautiful fleeting image of a small girl wearing angel wings atop a four-wheel drive cruising through the moonlit streets of South Liverpool. The guys won’t credit ideas to anyone individually from the writing workshops “ideas are bounced around a table – we don’t like to attribute”. Except perhaps for that imaginary writer.

David Perilli