David Blair has directed Jimmy McGovern's scripts for more than twenty years, and his method is simple: stay on the face after the line and let the damage show. It is unshowy work, and on The Street it is where the series lives.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what David Blair does when a line lands in The Street. Most television directors cut on the last word, to the reply or the reaction or anything that keeps the scene moving. Blair stays on the face a beat longer than is comfortable, and it is in that beat, when the character has heard what was said and has not yet decided what to do about it, that most of the damage in the series is done. Fabian Wagner and Ben Smithard shoot the Manchester terrace in flat northern daylight, through doorways and over the backs of sofas, and nobody has tidied anything up. The wallpaper is the wallpaper people actually chose. It looks like a street.
He began at BBC Glasgow as a producer, and the break came with Takin' Over the Asylum in 1994. The partnership that has shaped the career began with The Lakes in 1997, and with Jimmy McGovern he has since made The Street (2006–09), Accused (2010–12), Common (2014) and Care (2018). Around those there have been features, The Messenger (2015), Away (2016) and Hurricane (2018), and more recently Crime (2021) and Four Lives (2022). We have reviewed only The Street, but the shape of the credits is plain: working-class lives, large casts of established British actors, scripts with something to say.
The McGovern fit is the thing to understand. Blair has said that "he writes really economically which allows the film to expand and flourish", and that is a fair account of The Street: the writing supplies the bad decision, the direction supplies the time to watch it sink in. It is a job that leaves very little room for a director to be noticed, which is presumably why his notices are uniformly kind and his name is rarely the point of them. We are inclined to agree with them. There is an episode of The Street we found hard to sit through, not because of what was done but because Blair would not let us look away from the person it was done to; the camera stayed, and so did we.
Our one reservation follows from the method. A drama built on held faces and kitchen tables is a serious drama, and The Street would be better if it let anyone laugh. McGovern's scripts do not offer much in that line, and Blair's camera does not go looking for it. We have one series to judge from, so we will not guess whether he could.
He is not a director you go to see. He is a director whose actors you go to see, and who has spent nearly thirty years making sure you look at them for slightly longer than you would like. Start with The Street, and notice how seldom it cuts away.
Biography
David Blair is a British film and television director. He directed the BAFTA-winning series Takin' Over the Asylum (1994) and The Street (2006–2009).
Blair has maintained a long collaboration with writer Jimmy McGovern, directing episodes of The Lakes (1997), The Street, and Accused (2010–2012), as well as the television films Common (2014), Reg (2016) and Care (2018). His other credits include Tess of the D'Urbervilles (2008), the feature films Away (2016) and Hurricane (2018), and the series Crime (2021) and Four Lives (2022). He has received multiple BAFTA, RTS and International Emmy awards and nominations.
