Play for Today (TV Series) Home Sweet Home (1982) User Reviews

Happy Families!

[davidjack · 8/10 · 10 May 2000]

I have been trying hard to buy this film and others by Mike Leigh for a long time and at last managed to track them down in the USA.

This was an amusing film about 3 post office workers and their families. Stan who's wife had gone and left him was busy having affairs or chatting up his mate's wives and other ladies. His poor daughter must have found it hard when she came to visit from a children's home and it all came to a head in front of her. She may think twice about visiting her Dad again let alone living with him! I had to feel sorry for Harold, whatever he tried to do for for his wife (June) he couldn't please her and his attempts at humor failed to amuse his work mates. I think Hazel was simply being friendly when she asked Stan in for a chat and had no intention of having an affair with him. She is a friendly and outgoing. After all it was her husbands idea!

I found this an easy going and enjoyable film. It is light hearted even the social worker scenes. The social worker at the end is either eccentric or maybe highly intelligent or maybe a bit of both.

Wickedly funny comedy-drama about the lives of three postmen

[dr_clarke_2 · 9/10 · 16 May 2021]

1982's 'Home Sweet Home' is Mike Leigh's final Play for Today for the BBC, and follows the lives of three postmen. It's one of Leigh's more comic works, capturing the banality of everyday working life through a lens of deadpan humour, and is notable for marking the first collaboration between Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall.

'Home Sweet Home' focuses on the trio of aforementioned postmen, Timothy Spall's Gordon, Eric Richard's Stan, and Tim Barker's Harold. Not a great deal happens to them - the film simply charts their daily lives, including Gordon and Harold's marriages. Stan is estranged from his wife and is having an affair with Harold's wife June, between visits from social workers who want to discuss his relationship with his currently fostered daughter Tina. The stagnant tedium of Harold's marriage is obvious to the audience and his wife, but not to Harold, an incredibly boring man who spends much of his time cracking appalling jokes. Stan by contrast is a charismatic ladies man, who sees his job as an opportunity for illicit sex with single woman and bored housewives and flirts with Gordon's wife whilst Gordon is out. Gordon meanwhile is a lothario who spends most of his spare time watching television whilst his wife runs the house.

And that, basically, is it: Leigh shows us these interconnected ordinary lives, eventually building to a dramatic climax in the form of a disastrous Sunday dinner at Stan's, when June catches him kissing Hazel, Gordon and Hazel have a blazing row, and Stan's daughter Hazel gets caught in the middle. Following this, the play focuses on the fall-out, as June tells Harold that she has been having an affair with Stan. Having impotently demanded that she stops, Harold responds to her refusal by weakly lapsing into rhyme.

It's quite bleak and often very, very funny. There's a great scene in which Stan is visited by a friendly social worker who comes round to discuss his relationship with his daughter to his estranged wife, and mistakenly assumes that Stan has been in prison. There are lots of nice details and glimpses of other lives, for example the man who runs out to intercept a parcel and hide it in his car before Harold can post it through the letter box, leaving the viewers to draw their own conclusions about what it contains. The play ends with Lloyd Peters' hilarious erstwhile, left-wing, pretentious social worker Dave, to whose rambling Stan patiently listens; his overblown monologue plays over the end credits.

The film is shot on location in Hertfordshire and like all of Leigh's work, it shows off his understated but prodigious skill behind the camera, from the opening shot of Gordon riding his motorbike towards the camera, through his customary extensive use of close-ups to focus on his actors' faces, to the use of steadicam when Stan goes to see his fostered daughter Tina. His typical way of working with his actors bears its usual fruit, and the cast is excellent: There's a brilliant acted and uncomfortable scene between Harold and Su Elliott's June the evening after she has - unbeknown to Harold - had sex with Stan. She's in a vile mood and he's utterly powerless to say anything useful or comforting, desperately resorting the rhymes and bad jokes whilst she gets increasingly angry with him.

Carl Davis provides an incidental score that is often sinister and dramatic in a way that deliberately juxtaposes with what is happening on screen to memorable effect, providing the finishing flourish to a wickedly funny Leigh comedy-drama that demonstrates again just how good his early television work could be.

Mike Leigh at his best

[colinprunty-1 · 9/10 · 11 June 2020]

This is classic Mike Leigh , downtrodden postman , downtrodden housing estates , downtrodden lives and mundane storylines. Sounds horrendous but with fantastic performances from a brilliant cast that would probably cost a fortune to ensemble today we get a film of such quality it stays with you forever. It tells the story of three postman , Stan the monosyllabic Romeo who would sleep with any women with a pulse and does. We also have the slobbish Gordon played by Tim Spall to great comedy effect throughout. Lastly we have Harold Fish , a man so lacking in social skills it is an amazement he ever managed to charm his shrewish wife in the first place . Just brilliant and worth the price of the BBC Mike Leigh collection DVDS for this alone.

More downbeat black comedy from Mike Leigh

[Red-Barracuda · 5/10 · 20 August 2015]

Stan, Gordon and Harold are three postmen who work together. Harold tells awful jokes and dotes on his wife, while Stan carries out a secret affair with her as well as Gordon's missus. He finds himself harassed by Melody, an overbearing social worker who harangues him about seeing his daughter who is in a children's home. He eventually relents and takes her home for a weekend which entails going to Gordon and Hazel's for dinner. Needless to say it's a disaster and Stan's dark secrets come to the fore.

Home Sweet Home is another teleplay that Mike Leigh directed for the 'Play for Today' BBC TV series. Like the others it's a highly naturalistic view of ordinary people's lives. Also like a few of those films it makes for more than a little bit depressing viewing. As a comedy, it has some amusing moments, such as the late appearance of the anal social worker Dave and his inane chat. But the laughs are pretty thin on the ground here and it is more a slice of life drama than a true comedy.

Night leads to another day of misery

[jarrodmcdonald-1 · 13 July 2023]

There's something about Mike Leigh's work that grabs you. I am not sure if it's because the characters are simple, and the situations are anything but simple. Or if it's because despite the contrivances of the plot, the characters are still living out a solemn existence. And in this case, solemn is anything but boring.

The story focuses on three postal workers in Hertforshire who do the same mundane job day in and day out. Two are married (not to each other) and the third one, whose wife left him, is sleeping with both his coworkers' wives. What I like about the way this unfolds is how Leigh tells us right away that one of the affairs is occurring, but we do not know there is a second affair going on at the same time until halfway into the story. Gordon and Harold (Timothy Spall and Tim Barker), the unsuspecting husbands, don't find out their wives (Kay Stonham and Su Elliott) are unfaithful with their oversexed coworker Stan (Eric Richard) until near the end of the story.

Woven into this is the fact that Stan's teen daughter (Lorraine Brunning) is in foster care and a bubbly social worker (Frances Barber) is trying to help the daughter return home to live with Stan. The social worker is an unrealistic do-gooder who says "super" every thirty seconds and glosses over the problems in Stan's life as well as the fact that Tina, the daughter, is still emotionally unstable.

It's all rather depressing yet fascinating. Tina is allowed to spend a weekend with her father and while she's at home, she learns about Stan's affairs. She discovers her father's lecherous behavior at the same time that Gordon and Harold find out what Stan's been up to behind their backs. We're not meant to pity Stan but rather to feel sorry for the people that Stan messes over; and in some ways, Tina is getting messed over too because Stan's no model of stability for her to come home to.

The dialogue in this telefilm is crafted in a "natural" way that we feel like we're listening to real dysfunctional conversations. We're supposed to realize that all these people are trapped in some sort of unhappy working class environment. And we are also supposed to realize that none of society's solutions work for these people. Honesty leads to heartbreak; friendship leads to betrayal; childcare leads to alienation; intervention leads to disaster; and night leads to another day of misery.

The film ends after Stan's been found out, shortly after he speaks to a new social worker (Lloyd Peters) about Tina's mental health. Stan doesn't seem to be thrilled with the idea of having to deal with court-appointed imbeciles; or having to appear sincere in a conversation about how to fix Tina's problems. We then cut to a shot of Tina wandering around outside a group home.

It's not a feel-good ending at all. But in a way you do feel good after watching this story, because you realize that your own problems pale in comparison to what's just been depicted on screen.

Emblematic early-ish Mike Leigh

[philosopherjack · 3 March 2023]

Home Sweet Home is emblematic early-ish Mike Leigh, bitterly funny and appalling, inviting suspicions of condescension, but with too many flashes of desperate verisimilitude for any such charges to completely stick. A plot summary seems to align the film with randy workplace concoctions on the lines of On the Buses: postman Stan has an affair with the wife of one of his colleagues while being aggressively pursued by the wife of one of the others, things coming to a head when both women show up at his house at once. But Stan (Eric Richard) is no working-class Casanova, his appeal seeming mainly based in the contrast with the two inadequate husbands, and capable of awful self-serving coldness, as in the heartrending mini-portrait of his treatment of a woman he picks up at the launderette. His teenage daughter, Tina, has spent most of the time since her mother's departure in foster care or group homes; Stan only reluctantly visits her, his inadequacy as a father pushing him into irritable taciturnity. It's Tina who occupies the film's final shot, suggesting she's the most major casualty of the whole mess; a sly late pivot introduces a new social worker who bombards Stan with jargon while providing an ample window on his own bitter preoccupations. The title is ironic to a fault of course: as always, Leigh has an eerie capacity to create lived-in spaces and routines (how many cups of tea were offered and consumed in his work of this period?), while conveying how the frail economic predictability they provide is, as Sondheim might have put it, a daily little death. Tim Barker's indelibly conceived Harold may be the saddest of the sad bunch, his wife snapping back at his most basic utterances, a stream of dumb jokes and disconnected utterances failing to disguise how he's barely present in his own life, let alone anyone else's.