He takes them out to a club instead, where Michelle's best friend Mavis happens to be, and spots Bob with the girls. Despite her deprivations (or maybe because of them), Dunbar’s work is heroically free of self-pity, and her characters are intensely human, with all the usual human contradictions.


Her friend read the script and loved it, and sent it to Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre. Its portrayal of "ordinary" people's lives made it a cult film soon after its cinematic release. Ms Pearce said: "It would be nice to see it but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen because God's got no words for anybody, has he? By all accounts it was even better, but despite her continued success, she wasn’t interested in leaving the estate. Sue and Rita’s relationship is the only romantic element in the movie — a love so pure that even their menage-à-trois with Bob can’t spoil it. Rita, Sue and Bob Too is a 1987 British black comedy film directed by Alan Clarke, set in Bradford, West Yorkshire about two teenaged schoolgirls who have a sexual fling with a married man.

Michelle drags Rita out of her house and into Mavis's car, and takes her to Sue's flat to confront them both, with Bob now in tow.

After their night out, Bob and Michelle start arguing again, this time in front of Rita and Sue who desperately try not to laugh. At school, Bob shows up at Rita and Sue's PE tennis class to take them for a "jump" (sex). "Two Attempts at Social Comment Hit The Mark", "The Arbor: In the footsteps of Rita, Sue and Bob", "Where was 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too' filmed? The Bradford-born writer Andrea Dunbar was 15 when she penned her first play. The next day, Sue goes to Rita's house to walk to school together.

Dunbar told her about The Arbor. Location Management (1) Music Department (2) Script and Continuity Department (1) Transportation Department (1) Additional Crew (8) Serious and light-hearted by turns. Rita, Sue and Bob Too was an unexpected movie hit when it was released. He tries to plead with Sue, threatening suicide if she doesn't come back. She fell through a glass door when she was drunk and needed 60 stitches. With Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes, George Costigan, Lesley Sharp. In 1988, she was prosecuted for claiming benefits without declaring the royalties from her plays.

Billed as ‘Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down’, it now plays like a period piece — a picture of a starker, simpler world, where Bacardi was the drug of choice and sex was something that happened on the back seat of your brother’s Ford Cortina. But it would mean a lot. Dunbar left school at 16, had three children by three different men, and ended up in a refuge for battered women.

Congratulations on this excellent venture… what a great idea! Like The Arbor, Rita, Sue and Bob Too was drawn from her life on this estate: like Sue, she’d been beaten up by her boyfriend; like Sue, she’d shagged a married man.
She wrote The Arbor (1980) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982), an autobiographical drama about the sexual adventures of teenage girls living in a run-down part of Bradford, West Yorkshire.She wrote most of the adaptation for the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). When he goes into the bedroom he finds both girls semi-naked in his bed and he dives onto the bed to join them. Video, The woman who ferries Covid patients in a school bus, The story of the blaze that destroyed Moria camp. Rita, Sue and Bob Too is at BFI Southbank (www.bfi.org.uk) on 15 May, with a Q&A with cast and crew. Sue dates Aslam as a rebound to get over Bob and Rita. Read about our approach to external linking. That night, Michelle decides to let Bob have sex with her to stop him going off with other women, but it goes badly.