Sophie Gee

You know that I love a milf.

It's 1969, six years before the Sex Pistols formed and punk broke, and a 15-year-old boy from Yorkshire called Billy Casper flicked a V sign at the world.

A photograph of that moment became one of the iconic images of late 20th century Britain, appearing on T-shirts, posters, graffiti, and, of course, a book cover.

Now, Billy Casper wasn't a real person.

He's the anti-hero of Barry Hines' brilliant novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, published in 1968.

The book is a masterpiece in its own right, but it owes its fame and status in part to the film adaptation that was made immediately after it came out.

The director was Ken Loach, and he worked with Hines as a scriptwriter, and they decided to make the film exactly where the book is set, which is in and around Barnsley, a coal mining town in southwest Yorkshire.

The boy in the poster is, as a matter of fact, the 15-year-old David Bradley, who was a local working class boy without any acting experience, whose father had himself worked in the coal mines.

David Bradley and Billy Casper are almost inseparable in our imaginations.

And it's incredible how much David Bradley looks like Billy Casper, even though Billy Casper is an imaginary person.

And so that famous photograph taken on set became the image used on the cover of future editions of the book.

So good.

Wow.

And for anyone who hasn't seen Kez the film.

Oh, my goodness.

It's unbelievably great.

We'll talk more about it.

We'll talk more about how the book and the film are related to one another.

You almost can't have one without the other.

I mean, you definitely can't.