If Clarke had only made
Scum, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire and
Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, I doubt very much we'd be discussing him now. Not that those films are completely devoid of merit (even the much-maligned
Billy the Kid undoubtedly deserves credit for originality, as I argued
here), but they don't have more than a fraction of the potency of his best TV work. And his best TV work, as occasional collaborator David Leland memorably put it, "was alien enough to make people want to go round the back of the set to see if it was plugged in properly; in other words, 'How did this get on our screens?'".
Thanks to all sorts of cultural and economic factors, British filmmakers often had an incredibly important relationship with the small screen, and it's only thanks to lack of access to their television work that the latter isn't as celebrated as much as it frequently deserves. Ken Russell's work in the 1960s is eye-poppingly astonishing (for sheer risk-taking brilliance, it dwarfs anything that came later). Pawel Pawlikowski's in the 1980s and 90s hardly less so. Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh made hugely impressive bodies of work (and substantial bodies at that) between what were notionally their first and second features (1971-84 in Frears' case, 1971-88 in Leigh's). Prior to his post-1990s flowering, Ken Loach's major work was largely for television -
Kes aside, I can't think of any pre-1990s Loach features with the impact of
Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, Days of Hope and much else besides.
It's a tragedy that Clarke died when he did, as there's every possibility that his career could have seen a Loach-style big-screen resurrection - in fact, he was planning a US-based production when he died, which might have been a one-off, but it could have done wonders for his profile. Not least his critical profile, because it's a sad indictment of criticism in the UK that television has traditionally been taken much less seriously than film until very recently, and Clarke was definitely a victim of that.