It Couldn't Happen Here

Did You Know?

• The Variety Club Remix of the Saint Etienne single "Avenue" samples dialogue from the film.
• Saint Etienne are known for their admiration of the band, having sampled numerous Pet Shop Boys songs.

Plot

The video opens at dawn on Clacton-on-Sea beach in Essex, where dancers stretch and move to the song "It Couldn't Happen Here." Neil Tennant arrives on a bicycle, pedals to a kiosk, and buys postcards from the shopkeeper, played by Gareth Hunt. The shopkeeper grumbles about modern political problems, but Neil ignores him and writes his postcards. Elsewhere, Chris Lowe is in a bed and breakfast, tossing everything from his room into a trunk that seems to have no bottom.

He then runs downstairs and sits waiting for the landlady, Barbara Windsor, to bring breakfast. In the dining room, another character played by Gareth Hunt, Uncle Dredge, tells terrible jokes with a repeated catchphrase, annoying the other guests, though he acts meek around the landlady. She seems to disapprove of everyone except Chris, who remains expressionless. When an absurdly large Full English breakfast arrives, Chris dumps it over the landlady’s head and dashes outside, chased by a pack of bikers on motorcycles.

Back on the beach, Neil keeps cycling and passes a priest, Joss Ackland, who recites verses while leading a group of schoolchildren. Two of the boys are younger versions of the Pet Shop Boys; they break away and run to Clacton Pier. Inside a building on the pier, the adult Neil visits a fortune teller in exotic dress. As he leaves, she removes her veil to reveal Chris Lowe.

The young Neil and Chris, played by Nicholas and Jonathan Haley, look into a Victorian Mutoscope and watch a slapstick bedroom farce: a squire (Chris Lowe) and a butler (Neil Tennant) make advances to a French maid (Barbara Windsor). The priest catches up with the boys and shouts more verses at them. They escape into an amusement arcade, where they see a rock star (Neil Tennant) in a gold tasselled suit. They then move into a theatre, where a group of nuns perform a risqué dance to "It's a Sin."

The priest finds them again and takes them outside, now in the evening. On the pier, he orders twelve fishermen to pull a huge cross from the sea and load it onto their ship.

Production

The Pet Shop Boys decided to make a feature film after scrapping plans for an expensive theatrical tour. Neil Tennant explained that they had hired theatre directors and stage designers for the tour, intending to film it, but realized they couldn’t afford to take it on the road. Someone then proposed a full-length movie instead, which the band hoped would let fans see them perform without a live show. Chris Lowe said the group enjoyed making music videos and found the combination of sound and images fascinating, so a film felt like a natural progression.

They met Jack Bond, a director who had previously made BBC documentaries about Werner Herzog and Salvador Dalí. Tennant and Lowe gave Bond general ideas but largely let him do what he wanted. Tennant stressed they wanted to avoid clichés like pop stars caught in international conspiracies or endless rehearsal scenes for a big concert. According to Tennant, Bond placed the band into their own songs or his interpretations of them, but he insisted it wasn’t just a long music video.

He said the film avoided being too literal, resulting in a surreal style, and compared it to the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” rather than “A Hard Day’s Night.” Tennant later admitted he didn’t agree with all of Bond’s choices, but that didn’t bother him. The movie was shot over three weeks in November 1987 in Clacton-on-Sea and south London. Clacton locations included the pier, beach, promenade, amusement arcade, and the West Cliff Theatre for interior scenes, while the greensward served as a base camp for the crew and cast.

Reception

The theatrical release received largely negative reviews. Suzanne Moore, writing for New Statesman and Society, described the film as the terminal tedium of an average pop video extended to 30 times its natural life, crammed with images that go nowhere, and concluded that it had unfortunately happened. The Los Angeles Times said the Pet Shop Boys did not deserve the cruel fate they received, being purveyors of pleasant bubble-gum rock caught up in a string of MTV-type numbers overlaid with pseudo-surreal style and confounding philosophical discourse.

Nick Robinson of Music Week called the film a humorous look at England in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties and the darker moments most people go through, noting that the storyline is not easy to follow and that humour is spread thinly with a pervading air of melancholy. In a BFI review of the 2020 Blu-ray release, Sukhdev Sandhu observed that the biggest surprise for many fans would be the film's use of music, with some songs only heard in the background and others having their lyrics recited wanly by Tennant.

Jennie Kermode of Eye For Film rated the Blu-ray 2.5 stars, calling it not a great film but a fascinating cultural artefact, adding that without understanding the period and the language of pop videos it can feel like an incoherent mess, but that it is full of melancholy and an outsider's story with nostalgic longing. After making the film, Lowe said the director was keen to make another, and that they would rather just be the Pet Shop Boys than play characters in someone else's movie.

Home video

It Couldn't Happen Here was released on VHS on 1 December 1989, with a Laserdisc version available in the US and Japan. A dual format limited edition DVD and Blu-ray disc was released in the UK on 15 June 2020 by the British Film Institute, featuring seven specials including audio commentary, a 27-minute interview with Jack Bond, an interview with choreographer Arlene Phillips, the full-length "Always on My Mind" video, a 48-page digibook, image gallery, and original theatrical trailer. This release is now out of print. A standard release with a normal Blu-ray case followed on 20 July 2020.