First screened on ITV and directed by Ken Loach, After a Lifetime is something of a neglected, social realist masterpiece. It focuses on two brothers brought together by the death of their father which causes them to reflect on his life of militancy and political activism. At the time critic Nancy Banks Smith called it ‘brilliantly funny, and moving with a sort of subterranean rage’. Smith himself plays the older brother with a brilliant, raw emotion.