Billy Liar review – Tom Courtenay is superb in classic study of a young man and his quixotic dreams

This is John Schlesinger’s much-loved British comedy from 1963, based on the 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse, itself part of the now almost forgotten Angry Young Man movement of which John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim were the other two classic texts – though perhaps it is really only Osborne’s hero who is actually angry.

Tom Courtenay plays Billy, a cheeky, naughty young man who is as daft as a brush and lives semi-permanently inside his own Walter Mitty-ish fantasy world. (Amis’s Jim Dixon had his own propensity to indulge in micro-imagined situations to get him out of whatever mortifying little class-based humiliations he found himself in.) Billy lives at home in Yorkshire with his mum and dad and works as an undertaker’s clerk, of all the banal things; he takes refuge in his reveries, chiefly the fiction that he is the ruler of a bizarre Ruritanian land called Ambrosia (perhaps named after the brand of rice pudding). Billy wants to be a comedy writer, and he is, after all, the experienced comedy writer of preposterous situations that are happening inside his own head.