David Storey, in an unforgettable partnership with the director Lindsay Anderson, provided one of the great energising shocks of the 1960s, a blast of energy, smashing at the dullness, the complacency and hypocrisy of class-ridden Britain. Storey adapted his own 1960 novel This Sporting Life for the screen: Lindsay Anderson directed it, and won from Richard Harris a performance to rival Brando. He is Frank Machin, a gifted sportsman who wants to make it as a professional rugby league player (like Storey himself), but is poignantly in love with his widowed landlady, played by Rachel Roberts. Frank is a superstar on the field; he has money, success with women and a cocksure sense of himself that irritates the stuffy ruling class. Frank is that rarest of things in British cinema of that time: a success. Billy Liar might fantasise. Frank Machin lives the dream.

Storey’s movie took Britain beyond the miserable period between the end of the Chatterley ban in 1960 and the Beatles’ first LP – released a month after the film, in March 1963. Four years later, the contraceptive pill was made available to unmarried women, as well as to married women. There was more freedom, less snobbery, more prosperity, a little. But sex, and the unspoken fear of pregnancy, hung over everything. Sport was the displacement activity. When Frank crashes against other players, covered in mud, part warrior, part caveman, he’s working off frustration that any man can understand. And the fact that he’s doing it on the rugby field is brilliantly judged. Football would be too obviously déclassé: the game for gentlemen played by ruffians. Cricket wouldn’t interest Frank. But rugby lets Frank rub the posh types’ noses in it.

This Sporting Life is a fascinating film because it is about something that would grow to obsess everyone: celebrity. Frank rises through the social ranks, not through work, not through marriage, not through commercial success or perhaps a brilliant career in the armed forces – all things that the upper classes would find annoying but familiar. He does it through the new magic of celebrity, like the forthcoming pop stars, actors and fashion photographers of the 60s. He is famous: and he wants to make it pay.

Storey creates a brilliant scene in which Frank negotiates his pay using some deadpan brinkmanship with the pompous and self-important blazered types in charge (as arrogant, in their own way, as the private schoolmasters and prefects of Anderson’s If…). Again, Storey took his muddy boot to the humbug shamateurism of British sport – an affectation designed to keep out un-leisured, un-moneyed types who had to work for a living. Storey gives Frank a great line to celebrate his success: “I only enjoy it if I get paid a lot for it!” In This Sporting Life, Storey created a great working-class hero for the screen.