FEATURE: Celebrating Rocky's 50th Anniversary

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in October 2026. 

ROCKY AT 50: THE MAKING OF A LEGEND

In 1976, a low-budget film written by and starring a complete unknown became a massive hit before going on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The dramatic parallels between the plot of Rocky and the actual making of Rocky are so remarkable, so uncannily entwined, they sound too good to be true.

And yet, as Sylvester Stallone reminds us in his riveting new memoir The Steps, his protracted struggle to bring this much-loved classic to the screen was essentially the story of his difficult life thus far, a life scarred by childhood trauma and driven by a deep-seated need to prove himself in the face of constant rejection.

With invaluable editorial and emotional support from his first wife, Sasha, he poured everything into Rocky. This touchingly redemptive story of a penniless boxer who's given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fight the World Heavyweight Champion turned him into a star overnight and launched a decades-spanning franchise, but the original is unique in that it's a boxing film that isn't really about boxing.

It's a love story in which two marginalised characters – sweet-natured lunk Rocky Balboa and the pathologically shy survivor of familial abuse Adrian Pennino - find solace in each other while striving to escape from the lowly expectations they've both been shackled with.

Boxing just happens to be a not-exactly-subtle yet nevertheless tremendously effective metaphor for taking all the punches life throws at you while going the distance with as much dignity and pride as you can muster.

SPOILER: Rocky doesn't win the climactic fight with Apollo Creed, but that's not important. He survived all fifteen rounds and never gave up, never went down.

This was his one shot at greatness, his only chance to prove he wasn't “just another bum from the neighbourhood”. And – yo Adrian – he did it.

That beautiful final scene of Rocky and Adrian ecstatically embracing while post-match bedlam rages all around them? When nothing else matters apart from how much they love each other? It gets me every single time. Actual tears of joy.

This is why Rocky continues to resonate. It is, like Jaws, an absolutely perfect piece of popular entertainment that, no matter how many times you watch it, never fails to work its magic. Rocky gets everything right: the writing, direction, acting and score are working in tandem towards a common goal. Lightning in a bottle and all that jazz.

It could all have been very different, however, if Stallone hadn't stuck to his guns and insisted that he play Rocky.

The film's producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff loved his screenplay, or the crowd-pleasing central idea of it at least, but wanted a big name star as the lead. Stallone was an obscure supporting actor with unconventional looks and slurred speech who'd repeatedly been told he'd never make it. It's impossible to picture Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds as Rocky, but that's who the producers wanted.

They offered Stallone $60,000 for the script, which was more money than he'd ever dreamed of. This is someone who'd experienced periods of homelessness just a few years earlier, and who was so poor he'd recently been forced to sell his beloved Bullmastiff Butkus for a desperately needed $40. But still he wouldn't relent.

Stallone knew he would never get a great starring role like Rocky unless he wrote one for himself, so he just couldn't walk away. The exasperated producers kept raising their offer until they eventually put $300,000 on the table (about $2 million today). By this point he couldn't even conceptualise that amount of money beyond it being a large number.

“I had gotten so used to being stone broke,” he writes, “I literally didn’t know what I was missing. That kind of money didn’t conjure up any kind of emotions in me.”

Winkler and Chartoff finally caved and begrudgingly gave him the part, but not before drawing up a contract stipulating that if Stallone caused even the slightest amount of trouble on set he would be fired instantly. He also had to relinquish his ownership of the property.

These were hardly ideal conditions, but at least he could now afford to buy back Butkus from his new owner. Butkus then achieved screen immortality by playing Rocky's dog, Butkus.

The mimesis didn't end there. Stallone wore his own clothes in Rocky, apart from the famous black trilby which he bought for $3 while on location. He also cast his brother Frank as a street corner singer and his bullying father Francesco, a frustrated actor, as the big fight's ringside timekeeper. Not that he was remotely grateful for the favour.

Stallone's mother Jackie, meanwhile, was totally disinterested in the film, as she was in everything her son had done throughout his life. She was of course thrilled when his fame allowed her to achieve her own quasi-celebrity status, much to his embarrassment.

Shot over 28 days on the freezing streets of Philadelphia, Rocky was directed by John G. Avildsen, a staunch ally who shared Stallone's vision for the film. When the producers continued to make bizarre suggestions such as casting the glitzy likes of Cher or Bette Midler as Adrian, or turning Rocky's grizzled old trainer Mickey into a vile racist who hates Apollo, Avildsen acted as a calm negotiator on behalf of his understandably anxious star.

Meddling producers notwithstanding, the making of Rocky was blessed with serendipity. When Avildsen and Stallone discovered there was no money to hire the 200 extras needed for an ice rink scene featuring Rocky and Adrian on their first date, they decided to shoot it with just the two of them alone. The result was so much more romantic than originally planned, as these lonely souls got to know each other and fall in love in symbolic isolation.

And that aforementioned final scene? That was a late stage rewrite, as Stallone was unhappy with the already filmed ending of Rocky and Adrian walking back into obscurity through an empty arena. Ever the optimist, Stallone knew the film had to leave audiences feeling an enormous upsurge of love-conquers-all euphoria.

He was right. When Rocky won its Best Picture Oscar, the suddenly very rich and famous actor/writer stood on stage between Winkler and Chartoff, raised their arms aloft, and declared, “To all the Rockys in the world, I love ya!”

And there it was, victory stolen from a lifetime of rejection and cruel rebuke. A real-life underdog story. Stallone was Rocky, and Rocky was Stallone, a mirror image united in triumph. To this day you can tell he still can't quite believe it.

The Steps by Sylvester Stallone is available now. I Play Rocky, a Peter Farrelly-directed biopic based on the making of the film is released next month.

FEATURE: Remembering Caroline Aherne

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in June 2026.

Of all the great artists and entertainers who passed away in that accursed year 2016, Caroline Aherne was one of the hardest losses. She was only 52, a relatively young woman who should still by rights be with us now.

She wouldn't welcome the accolade, but she was also a national treasure, a comedian, writer and actor of exceptional talent who, quite simply, made an awful lot of people very happy. We didn't just admire her work, whether as Mrs Merton or as co-creator/star of The Royle Family, we liked her as a person.

At the risk of sounding weirdly parasocial, she belonged to that vanishingly rare breed of celebrities you could easily imagine having as a friend, or at the very least an acquaintance who makes you laugh at work or down the pub.

That's a quality some celebrities try very hard to cultivate, but Aherne always felt like the real, unselfconscious deal. Naturally funny, likeable and clever (she had an IQ of 176, so an actual genius), her huge success and generations-spanning appeal were essentially rooted in the fact that she was an 'ordinary' working-class person with an extraordinary gift for capturing our shared life experience through a prism of acutely observed comedy.

The characters she created, usually in conjunction with her close friend and writing partner Craig Cash, were people we recognised from our everyday lives. We've all met a Jim Royle, for example, that lazy, miserly, often boorish yet fundamentally decent Royle Family patriarch. He might even be a member of your own family. He might even be you. And that's okay, you weren't being held up to abject ridicule.

Much like the Royles themselves, Aherne always took the piss with warmth and affection.

Even when she cheekily mocked her celebrity guests in the deceptively innocent, purple-rinsed guise of OAP chat show host Mrs Merton, there was never anything cruel or sneering about her comedy, she never punched down.

“So Debbie, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”

That loaded question, which Aherne as Merton faux-gently fired at the magician's wife and glamorous on-stage assistant Debbie McGee, is rightly regarded as a classic line. An immortal put-down. It's important to remember, however, that McGee didn't laugh through gritted teeth. She was genuinely tickled by Aherne's willingness to go there. She got the joke, and because she actually loved her talented millionaire husband, didn't feel offended at all.

One suspects that Aherne instinctively knew that: Debbie will be up for a daft laugh, just as I am.

Her instincts also proved correct during that famous Mrs Merton interview with the racist comedian Bernard Manning, an encounter in which Aherne basically breaks character to challenge him on his bigotry. Her elderly studio audience laugh along with him at first, but when she gradually exposes just how unrepentantly horrible he was, you can sense their discomfort and inner conflict. As Aherne later acknowledged, some of those pensioners were probably quite racist themselves, but you would hope that interview made them question some of their knee-jerk prejudices.

She did that a lot in her work, it was a defining characteristic. As her friend and occasional collaborator Steve Coogan observed in the touching 2003 BBC documentary Caroline Aherne: Queen of Comedy – which is still available on iPlayer – she was inarguable proof that “clever, intelligent comedy can appeal to everyone.”

Most of us first became aware of Aherne via her memorable contributions to The Fast Show. One of her recurring characters, Our Janine, was a pregnant, working-class teenage girl whose stream-of-consciousness monologues oscillated between naive absurdity and utter bleakness.

But you never got the impression that Aherne was laughing at this kid, it's more that she was – like so many great comedians – fully aware that comedy and tragedy, absurdity and pathos, are sometimes barely indistinguishable. They exist side by side, poking at each other like family-members squashed on an old settee.

Compare her treatment of Janine to the way Catherine Tate and Little Britain depicted working-class teenage girls in their depressingly popular sketches. Scornful stereotypes perpetrated by middle-class comedians going for cheap and easy laughs.

Matt Lucas has, at least, latterly expressed sincere regret about that. Caroline Aherne, however, never had to apologise for anything. Sure, some of those later Royle Family festive specials were atrocious, utterly gobsmacking disasters in which formerly nuanced and beloved characters were turned into cartoon caricatures of their former selves.

God only knows what happened there, but fortunately no one ever thinks of them when they remember the woman who helped to redefine what a British sitcom could be. Caroline Aherne adored Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and saw no reason why you couldn't combine those influences to create a programme in which nothing and everything happens all at once. We laughed, we cried, we loved spending time with that family.

Aherne was adamant that it shouldn't have a laugh-track, that it should all be shot on film, in real time. She knew it would work, just let it breathe and be what it is. The people will come, they will understand. And they did.

Whenever Ricky Gervais boasts that The Office changed the sitcom landscape, remember this: The Royle Family did it first.

When funny people die – and there were few funnier than Caroline Aherne – our grief is tinged with a kind of selfish disbelief and resentment. This person will no longer be around to make us laugh, and that's not fair. But the work lives on, forever.

We didn't know Caroline Aherne, she owed us nothing. That she gave us so much was a blessing.

Caroline Aherne: Rebel in Disguise, a new biography by David Scott, is out now via Manchester University Press.

BOOK REVIEW: BFI Film Classics: A Hard Day's Night by Samira Ahmed

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2026.

BFI Film Classics: A Hard Day's Night, Samira Ahmed, out now, Bloomsbury Publishing, £11.69

Released at the height of Beatlemania in 1964, the Beatles' first film A Hard Day's Night could've easily been a formulaic pop vehicle churned out with little thought or effort.

That it ended up being a unique fusion of the French Nouvelle Vague, British social realism, surrealism, pop art, sitcom, satire, silent cinema slapstick, the Marx Brothers and quasi-cinema verite is testament not only to the band's integrity – they insisted that the film have some artistic merit – but also to the combined talents of screenwriter Alun Owen, director Richard Lester and his artisan crew.

In BFI Film Classics: A Hard Day's Night, the esteemed writer and broadcaster Samira Ahmed delivers a fascinatingly detailed study of the film's production, some perceptive scene-by-scene analysis, and a wider exploration of its sociohistorical context.

A Beatles fan since childhood, Ahmed captures – to quote her choice description – “the eternal Saturday afternoon energy” of this hugely influential and innovative cinematic landmark. A film very much of its time yet somehow timeless – Ahmed notes that only one fleeting piece of dialogue has aged badly – AHDN perfectly encapsulates the wit, charm and explosive musical synergy of the Beatles in their irreverent hive-mind, mop-top pomp.

It's also a cheerfully anti-establishment rock 'n' roll comedy in which a bunch of 'long-haired louts' scamper through a beautifully photographed monochrome world governed by entitled reactionaries and baffled authority figures, and a metatextual – yet never bitter – commentary on the grinding pressures of fame and mass media commodification.

As Ahmed observes, with typical acuity, AHDN is “a film in which the Beatles are frequently reproduced through camera viewfinders, studio monitors, TV set backdrops of beetles and leaping life-size blow-ups.”

The book is, by Ahmed's own admission, not a dry piece of academic film theory. It's an elegantly written, palpably affectionate essay brimming with sharp insight and commendably thorough research. Like all the best retrospective pop culture writing, it will encourage readers to revisit a familiar text with fresh, eager eyes.

BOOK REVIEW: Young Once: A Life Less Heavy by Nigel Planer

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in March 2026.

Young Once: A Life Less Heavy by Nigel Planer, out now, John Murray Press, £22

The actor and comedian Nigel Planer is fully aware that, when he dies, his obituaries will lead with the fact that he played Neil in The Young Ones. He doesn’t mind. On the contrary, he’s proud of the role he played in the alternative comedy revolution and he’s grateful for the opportunities it afforded him.

As his highly entertaining and endearingly droll memoir Young Once: A Life Less Heavy reminds us, Planer has enjoyed a long, successful career doing something he absolutely loves. It’s been quite the colourful life so far; he’s packed a lot in. 

Smart, funny, self-aware and thoroughly likeable, Planer is an engaging raconteur with anecdotes to spare. Inevitably, the most riveting chapters are devoted to his memories of working with the groundbreaking Comic Strip gang, a period he writes about with a vivid combination of fondness and unsentimental honesty.  

Scholars of memoirs written by ageing alternative comedians will be pleased to note that, as always, Keith Allen comes across as a massive pain in the arse, while Rik Mayall emerges – just as you’d hope – as a charismatic force of nature. Planer’s account of the day his old friend died is so very sad and beautifully written.  

It’s also a touching love story. Planer first met Roberta when he was an unknown jobbing actor in the late ’70s. They hit it off immediately; actual soulmates. To cut a long story short – it involves a long period of estrangement and some other romantic relationships, which Planer covers discreetly – they’re now happily married.  

As he notes in his foreword, the whole thing resembles an utterly implausible Richard Curtis romcom. But so much better than that.

BOOK REVIEW: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace by Robert Polito

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in March 2026.

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace by Robert Polito, out now, WW Norton & Co, £25

Received wisdom dictates that Bob Dylan’s imperial phase was in the ’60s and ’70s, with everything after that little more than an extended footnote of only occasional interest. That, argues the celebrated author, poet and academic Robert Polito in After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace, is arrant nonsense. Dylan’s genius didn’t fade, it continued to evolve and mutate in all sorts of fascinating ways. 

His persuasive thesis unfolds from around 1991 to 2024, 30-plus years of peripatetic creativity during which Dylan released 13 albums, played over 3,000 dates on his never-ending tour, published two books, co-wrote and starred in a film, hosted a weekly radio show between 2006 and 2009, exhibited his paintings and sculptures in galleries all over the world, and received – with typical wariness – the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Polito provides in-depth analysis of all the key works from this period in a kinetic prose style befitting his subject. His fluid torrent of questions, allusions, digressions and theories never loses focus, there is method to his idiosyncratic approach to this material.

It flits back and forwards in time, thus emphasising his overall point that, for Dylan, history isn’t a thing of the past, but rather something that is constantly in flux, a vast tapestry of characters, incidents and places, an infinitely repeating hall of mirrors, a swirling collage of facts, memories, fantasies and dreams he can draw upon to create timeless works of art.  

The Dylan we find here is a voracious collector of weird Americana, a man steeped in decades of popular culture – both so-called high and low – who continues to delight in confounding expectations.

While it’s impossible to imagine Dylan ever reading a book about himself, I suspect he’d get a kick out of this one. It’s thoughtful, enlightening, slightly offbeat and never dull.

BOOK REVIEW: Box of Delights: The Story of BBC Children's Television – 1967-1997

This article was orginally published in The Big Issue in February 2026.

Box of Delights: The Story of BBC Children's Television – 1967-1997, Richard Marson, out now, Ten Acre Books, £29.99

During his downtime while recording episodes of Play School, Johnny Ball would sometimes cheerfully drop-kick Humpty through the round window.

That's just one of the many vivid details contained within Richard Marson's Box of Delights: The Story of BBC Children's Television – 1967-1997, which serves as both a celebration of and elegy for a lost epoch of creativity pioneered by a colourful gang of mavericks, eccentrics and ideologically dedicated professionals.

A former editor-in-chief of Blue Peter, Marson has authored several excellent books about the 'golden age' of British TV, but this may be his magnum opus. It isn't a nostalgic list-based reference tome – not that there's anything wrong with those – it's a meticulously-researched, narrative-led piece of history examining the politics and culture of the BBC at a time when the in-house Children's Department was more or less left to its own ingenious devices.

Marson emphasises the important fact that so many of the brilliant producers who thrived during that era were women. He provides detailed character studies of all the key players while also finding room for information on seemingly every single programme the department produced during its heyday.

The epic narrative is anchored by all the behind-the-scenes drama of cornerstones such as Blue Peter, Grange Hill, Jackanory, Newsround, Record Breakers and those Saturday morning live behemoths, the latter of which basically invented a brand new form of TV presentation.

Marson's mission is ably abetted by an often delightfully indiscreet cadre of interviewees, including Johnny Ball, Zoe Ball, Russell T. Davies, Sarah Greene, Chris Packham, Andi Peters, Phil Redmond, Michaela Strachan and Anthea Turner. Their frankness is one of the book's key assets; at this stage in their lives and careers they clearly have nothing to lose by telling the unfiltered truth as they see it.

There's no point denying the gossipy allure of a book in which a certain beloved children's TV presenter – not one of those mentioned above - is accused of being an insufferable egomaniac. And some of the more hair-raising anecdotes were, as Marson and his interviewees are quick to acknowledge, very much the product of 'different times'. To examine the past truthfully, outdated attitudes must occasionally rear their ugly heads.

But this is, fundamentally, an affectionate tribute to the vast array of gifted people who devoted their professional lives to making high-quality television steeped in those core Reithian values: inform, educate, entertain.

We will, for various maddening executive-led reasons, never see their likes again.

BOOK REVIEW: A Mind Of My Own by Kathy Burke

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in January 2026.

A Mind Of My Own by Kathy Burke is out now (Gallery UK, £22)

Kathy Burke’s mother, Bridget, died of cancer when Burke was only two years old. Her late father, Pat, was an alcoholic prone to violent rages. As Burke half-jokingly declares in the foreword to her frank, funny and wise autobiography, A Mind of My Own, Pat is the only ghostwriter you’ll find in these pages.

This is no misery memoir by any stretch of the imagination, Burke is far too self-aware for that sort of nonsense, but she does capture the stark reality and tedium of growing up with an alcoholic parent in the house. She and her two older brothers would long for the peace that would descend when he was asleep, away on days-long benders, or those occasional periods of sobriety.

Burke also writes about her own problems with heavy drinking in the 80s and discreetly alludes to a dark period in the early '90s – “the bad, sad days” – when she was involved in a difficult romantic relationship.

Otherwise, this is an upbeat and enoyable account of a talented working-class woman who only ever wanted to act, write, direct and entertain.

Burke comes across just as you’d expect, a thoroughly decent, kind and non-judgemental person who reserves her ire for those who deserve it, eg she didn’t enjoy working with a pre-Trainspotting Danny Boyle (“He reminded me of a supercilious priest from my childhood.”), and once called Helena Bonham-Carter a “stupid cunt” in a letter to Time Out after HBC complained in all sincerity that it’s harder for attractive posh actors to evade typecasting than it is for “non-pretty, working-class” actors. She has no time at all for patronising luvvies.

Seriously, be more like Kathy Burke.