Wish You Were Here is a 1987 British comedy-drama film written and directed by David Leland and starring Emily Lloyd, Tom Bell, Geoffrey Hutchings, and Jesse Birdsall.

In the early 1950s, sixteen-year-old Lynda Mansell lives in a small English seaside town with her widowed father Hubert and younger sister, Margaret.

Feisty, outspoken, and bawdy, Lynda likes to shock other people with her histrionic behaviour (bicycling on the promenade with her skirt hiked up, inviting young men to compare her legs to Betty Grable's) and vulgar speech (her favourite insults are "Up yer bum" and "Cock Off") which alienate her from her peers and her sister.

Her father finds her employment at a variety of places, including a ladies' hair salon, a bus depot, and a fish and chip van, but her behaviour always loses her the job.

Their argument escalates into a public spectacle, with Lynda climbing onto a table and shouting about British respectability and hypocrisy, while insulting customers.

[8] Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Lynda's wild outbursts - toward the end of the film, she insults her lover and denounces her father in the genteel tea room where she works as a waitress - are as entertaining as they are cathartic, and Miss Lloyd delivers these strings of epithets as colorfully as Mr. Leland writes them.

Miss Lloyd [manages] to seem both feisty and fragile...capturing the full emotional range of this complicated young girl".

[6] Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times complimented the film's attention to period detail, as well as Leland's direction, citing "[he] has a reason, a purpose, a history for every character—and for every claustrophobic brick row-house or damp, echoing picture palace".