Den­nis Skin­ner: Nature of the Beast

Den­nis Skin­ner, nick­named the ​‘Beast of Bolsover’ and a Labour MP since 1970, nar­rates this nuts and bolts doc­u­men­tary about his life in pol­i­tics. It’s an infor­ma­tive film, but for any­one already well acquaint­ed with Skin­ner it lacks an ele­ment of discovery.

Den­nis Skin­ner: Nature of the Beast, direct­ed by Daniel Drap­er, gets to the heart of Skinner’s polit­i­cal pas­sion through inter­views with the man him­self, his fam­i­ly and res­i­dents of his con­stituen­cy. The film relies heav­i­ly on the strength of Skinner’s con­vic­tion as a cham­pi­on of the peo­ple, the tenac­i­ty of its sub­ject mak­ing up its for­mu­la­ic structure.

Bland visu­als and a basic set-up leaves it up to Skin­ner to keep us inter­est­ed, and to be fair he is a like­able, ground­ed, relent­less­ly opti­mistic and fun­ny indi­vid­ual – in one par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoy­able moment he refers to David Cameron in the House of Com­mons as ​“Dodgy Dave”.

At its most con­trived, Drap­er cou­ples pret­ty panora­mas of the British coun­try­side with Skinner’s polit­i­cal speech­es. The direc­tor also cap­tures Skinner’s pas­sion for and exten­sive knowl­edge of agri­cul­ture (hence the ​‘nature’ part of the title), which is best realised when Skin­ner speaks direct­ly into the cam­era. A vet­er­an polit­i­cal fire­brand like Skin­ner real­ly deserves a less gener­ic pro­file though.

Skin­ner talks about the need to keep up with the times and remain cur­rent, yet the style of this film will not appeal to young peo­ple. Drap­er allows the urgency of Skinner’s voice to be dried out by too much rose-tint­ed rem­i­nisc­ing. At one point, Skin­ner address­es the view­er and says, ​“I’m proud to have fought every sin­gle day – I’d love to do it again.”