Film Night: 24 Hour Party People

It’s been a little while since I wrote about the films I’ve been watching, mostly because I haven’t been watching too many. It’s usually a Sunday thing, but since Top Gear has came back, I’ve slowed down my film watching. But I did watch a really good film the other night, 24 Hour Party People.

It’s a film I’ve kind of seen before. I caught around 30 minutes of this years and years ago, loved it and wanted to watch it again, but never knew what the film was called. I then found out, and so was finally able to give this film a watch for it’s entirety, and it’s a good one!

I have watched so much stuff around the 80’s and 90’s and popular culture, music, general life and everything in between, and of course living in the 90’s was epic, watching films and TV set around this decade will always mean something to me. 24 Hour Party People is exactly that, a comedy-drama film set in the mid 70’s to the early 90’s about the music scene in Manchester.

It’s all about the bands through these decades, from Joy Division to New Order and the Happy Mondays. It centres around Tony Wilson, a news reporter for Granada Television played by Steve Coogan. He goes from creating a series on TV about the punk rock shows in Manchester to eventually founding a record company, Factory Records, and then the infamous Hacienda nightclub.

The film is a dramatisation based on real events as well as rumours, and catalogues the highs and the lows of the life in the music scene around the time, with a lot of memorable and infamous faces playing roles, including Peter Kay, Ralf Little, John Simm and Rob Brydon all featuring.

The film was a brilliant watch, if you like music or life from this era then you’ll love it, although you’ve probably seen the film before, since it was released in 2002!