Pop stars Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, known internationally as the Pet Shop Boys, take a melancholic stroll through a warped, deteriorating England in Jack Bond’s surreal art film It Couldn’t Happen Here. It was a commercial failure on release back in 1987, and was largely dismissed as self-indulgent and little more than an extended Pet Shop Boys music video. Both of those accusations are essentially true, of course. There is an enormous level of pretention to the film, and Bond has captured the gloomy pop tones of Tennant and Lowe’s music very well. At the same time it is all oddly effective. It could only exist in the year it was made, and is a unique artefact of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

British pop in the 1980s seemed infused with artistic aspiration, whether via the art school influences of Duran Duran and the new romantics, or the more archly styled lyrics of Pet Shop Boys and the Smiths. The introduction of the music video as something more than a means of selling 7″ singles made the visual aesthetic of a band or singer as important as their sound. It Couldn’t Happen Here is a product of its time. In the 1970s it would lack its literary sensibilities. In the 1990s it would never be quite so directly on-the-nose in its satire.

What is ostensibly a road movie takes a cynical route through a Britain full of prurient sleaze: women in lingerie, pornography, and Carry On-style innuendo. At the same time it is all rather sexless and worn out. It is also a tired and old Britain, with the supporting roles taken up by a roster of pre-1980s talent including Gareth Hunt and Joss Ackland. The journey rides through bed-and-breakfasts, seaside funfairs, ‘greasy spoon’ dinners, and dull rural countryside. The urban decay seems ever-present. There is a regular appearance of war-time Britain, in the signage, the architecture, and soldiers waiting solemnly at train stations.

‘You’re not one of them, are you?’ asks Gareth Hunt’s lecherous tea stall proprietor of Neil Tennant. It turns out he means a politician, but the subtext is hardly subtle. Add liberal amounts of Catholic guilt, regular references to sin, and scenes of Tennant calmly telephoning his mother from within a phone box surrounded by neo-Nazis, and you get a deep threatening undertone to what could easily be mistaken for frivolous silliness. Culturally 1987 was close to the epicentre of homophobia in Britain, with the widely condemned “Section 28” laws passing the following year. Bond’s vision of Britain is of a culture obsessed with sex but deeply hostile to honest sexuality. It is no coincidence that the film’s lead female actor, who plays a variety of roles including Tennant’s mother, a religious hotelier, and a 19th century French maid, is Barbara Windsor – a popular star of the sex-obsessed Carry On comedies of the 1960s and 1970s.

In one key sequence, Joss Ackland is an absolute delight as a reported serial killer that hitches a ride with the Pet Shop Boys in a car. He manages to be both wonderfully odd, rather funny, and yet simultaneously deeply unsettling. That combination of tones is It Couldn’t Happen Here at its best. At its worst, it is simply odd. A lot of musical artists and bands have starred in their own motion pictures. This is not the best of those films, but I do think it is the most interesting.