Nuts In May (1976)

‘“I want to see the zoo,” she said. “I want to see the zoo.”’
Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Roger Sloman, Alison Steadman, Anthony O’Donnell
Defining moment: Keith and Candice Marie sit outside their tent singing the hippy ditty ‘We’re Off To See The Zoo’ while press-ganging lonely Welsh camper Ray to join in.
Although Mike Leigh is a director known for finding humour in a number of unlikely locations (the incessant, free-form ramblings of a rapist-on-the-run in ‘Naked’ or the frigid mutterings of courting suburbanites in ‘Bleak Moments’), his 1976 ‘Play for Today’ about a pair of socially maladjusted, aggressively persnickety, tea-cosy-hat-wearing campers is probably his funniest film. On one level, ‘Nuts in May’ presents the queer British pastime of camping as a fool’s game: logistically awkward, deathly boring and a magnet for various different types of (generally low-income) souls who perhaps shouldn’t be thrown together in a big empty field. Tossing out a conventional three-act structure in favour of small, tragicomic vignettes, the film’s humour comes from sustained moments of intense unease rather than a hackneyed string of contrived gags. Very funny but also, in the end, very sad. David Jenkins