The White Bus

[4] The main character, only referred to as 'The Girl' leaves London, goes north on a train full of football fans and takes a trip in a white double-decker bus around an unnamed city she is visiting (although clearly based on Manchester, near Delaney’s hometown of Salford).

The film was originally commissioned by producer Oscar Lewenstein, then a director of Woodfall, as one third of an anthology feature entitled Red, White and Zero (1967), with the other sections supplied by Anderson's Free Cinema collaborators Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz[5] from the other short stories by Shelagh Delaney.

[6] The two other planned sections of the film developed into Richardson's Red and Blue (1967) and – Reisz having dropped out – Peter Brook's Ride of the Valkyrie (1967), neither of which are related to Delaney's work.

If the tour which the girl joins is meant to be a generalised attack on the prim self-satisfaction of provincial officialdom, we are surely entitled to something with a harder edge than the patronising attitudes which the film seems to be striking.

It is all rather obvious, confected with gimmicky photography and flashes of harsh colour, and the humour consists of a few intellectual giggles among feet of humdrum sightseeing around a town hardly worth seeing.