Sheffield on Screen: 'Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?' (1999)

Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? is a peculiar film, but it’s also a fun one. The opening credits are displayed alongside camcorder footage of a young man (the protagonist and narrator Vincent) scattering his father’s ashes atop the Big Dipper at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The film then goes back some years to 1977, “the year of the Fever” according to Vincent (referring to Saturday Night Fever, rather oddly given that it was released in the US right at the end of 1977, and not in the UK until March 1978), and consequently it is pervaded by disco culture.

As the film opens the camera focuses on a poster of John Travolta as Tony Manero, striking his famous disco finger pose, and then zooms out to Vincent, dressed in a leisure suit with pyjama bottoms, dancing around his bedroom. As he leaves the house the film begins a parody of the iconic opening sequence of Saturday Night Fever, with a suited-and-booted Vincent strutting down the street to the Bee Gees’ ‘Night Fever’, a row of Sheffield’s terraced houses standing in for Tony Manero’s bustling Brooklyn.

The plot (or, more accurately, plots) of Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? is something of a tangled mess. In one strand there is Vincent Smith, a disco-obsessive employed as a dogsbody at “South Yorkshire’s most stylish law firm” who, after embarrassing himself in the pursuit of love, decides to hang up his platform shoes and become a punk. In another strand there is his father, the titular Harold Smith, an unassuming retiree who, unbeknownst to his family, has been in possession of strange psychic powers since he was a child.

I won’t go into much detail about the madcap plot, but to give you an idea, almost halfway through the film Vincent delivers a wonderful summation: “In a few short days, my mum got off with my best mate, I fell in love with a punk girl and became a punk, and my dad accidentally killed three pensioners”.

The most significant thing about Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? is that, for a relatively unknown film, it has a bizarrely star-studded cast. Harold Smith himself is played by Tom Courtenay, a veteran of British social realism who was knighted two years after the film’s release (though, I’m sure, for other things). His wife, the adulterous Irene, is played by Scottish popstar Lulu in a rare acting role. Vincent’s moustachioed boss is played by David Thewlis, now most recognisable for his role as Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter films, and his best friend is played by a youthful, mop-headed James Corden in his second ever film role, donning a Sheffield accent that is utterly incongruent with his constitutionally South East of England countenance. 

The film also features the screen debut of Charlie Hunnam, who plays Daz, a perpetually irate young punk with an impressive reverse mohawk who mainly roams angrily around Sheffield shouting and punching things. The standout performance of the film, however, is that of Stephen Fry as Dr. Robinson, a parody of an atheistic, liberal academic who raises his two daughters in comedically excessive accordance with rational principles (you will see his bare buttocks as he stands naked whilst delivering a sex education demonstration). 

Some of the film’s most charming moments come amidst Vincent’s clumsy transition from disco to punk, which is characterised by the kind of teenage awkwardness that everyone can relate to (though of course I myself have always fit in seamlessly and with effortless cool). After having had this punk epiphany and tearing down his Saturday Night Fever poster, Vincent immediately goes out to buy an entirely new wardrobe of clothes, spray paints the misspelling ‘ANACHY’ on the back of a new jacket, and fails to pierce his own ear over the kitchen sink.

Nervous as he first prepares to socialise with fellow punks, he instinctively smoothes his hair down before remembering that punks are supposed to have spiky hair and tousling it back up; then, his perfectly affable Sheffield accent and his pleasant weather-based small talk then mark him immediately as a figure of ridicule to the punks. This identity crisis culminates in my favourite moment of the film, when, after being spurred during a romantic moment to sing a song from his bedroom window, Vincent, in a fumbled attempt to adhere to his new punk identity, hilariously opts to perform an ill-advised and inappropriate slow rendition of The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ (which, again, is really not the sort of thing I’d ever have done).

Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? is a largely forgotten film, but despite (or perhaps because of) its winding and muddled plot, it is a lot of fun to watch. 1970s industrial Sheffield is an interesting setting for a magical realist story, and with the clash of subcultures at the centre of the narrative it ends up feeling something like Quadrophenia written by Roald Dahl. The film was originally released as a product of 1970s nostalgia, with a number of cameos from the former television stars of the time. However, given its cast of now-famous faces, its depiction of 1977 through the strange, optimistic lens of 1999, and the odd knowing reference to the end of the millennium, it may now actually be of interest as a piece of Y2K nostalgia.