Adrian Edmondson in ‘Honest, Decent & True’

Brit writer/director/auteur Mike Leigh is partly famous for his method of creating shooting scripts: he works with each actor in turn to develop a character, then formulates a story based on improvisations between the various characters.

But he wasn’t the only notable figure to work in that way. Les Blair, a Manchester college friend of his, was another. Blair devised and directed two superb Play For Todays for the BBC, ‘Blooming Youth’ (1973) and ‘Bet Your Life’ (1976), before embarking on a varied career including a few feature films.

But two of his most intriguing TV plays were made during the 1980s: ‘Honest, Decent & True’ (1986) and ‘News Hounds’ (1990). They make for fascinating viewing today, shining a light on two of the decade’s most lucrative and controversial industries: advertising and tabloid journalism.

Both star ‘Comic Strip’/’Young Ones’ comedy hero Adrian Edmondson, and he plays a blinder in both. In ‘Honest, Decent’ he’s a hapless, ethically-challenged ad man, in ‘News Hounds’ he’s a tabloid hack with the morals of a sewer rat. He brilliantly subverts his madcap image to play nuanced, troubling characters, and he’s clearly fond of these two films, focusing on them in some detail in his recent autobiography. It’s a shame he hasn’t been called on to play more serious roles in his career.

‘Honest, Decent’, which won a major award at the San Francisco Film Festival of 1986, also features a great cast including Arabella Weir, Gary Oldman and Richard E Grant in his first screen role and only credit before ‘Withnail’. Grant nicely embodies the kind of ‘liberated’, louche, humourless ad man you’d come across in the 1980s, into Asian architecture, yoga and new-age music, probably driving an Audi Quattro too.

Elsewhere Leigh veteran/ex-wife Alison Steadman shows up in ‘News Hounds’ to brilliantly portray a celebrity interviewer, pitched somewhere between Nina Myskow and Lynn Barber. It’s another classic performance, and reportedly one of her favourite roles.

It’s nice to revisit these amusing, almost-forgotten movies on some hot-button topics of the ’80s (and ‘News Hounds’ is still extremely relevant courtesy of the Leveson Enquiry and its reverberations). As for Les Blair, apparently he’s still teaching at the London Film School, an alumnus of which is one M. Leigh…