Watch FMovies. Ken Loach's first production for ITV, shown under the 'Sunday Night Theatre' strand (originally broadcast 18th July 1971). After a Lifetime is something of a neglected, social realist masterpiece that focuses on two brothers, brought together by the death of their father, reflecting on his life of militancy and political activism. At the time critic Nancy Banks Smith called it ‘brilliantly funny, and moving with a sort of subterranean rage’. Smith himself plays the older brother with a brilliant, raw emotion.