The pull of the city is emptying rural England - and making it look ever more like a desert

One of the most intriguing films to hit the nation’s cinema screens this year is Guy Myhill’s directorial debut, The Goob. Its distinctiveness lies not so much in the elemental subject matter – this includes first love and a gauche school leaver’s uneasy dealings with his mother’s lairy new boyfriend – as its setting, 60 miles out of London in a Fenland hamlet where the chief source of employment is fruit-picking, and the principal recreation stock-car racing on a beaten-up track watched by an audience of slack-jawed teenage girls. Unusually for a piece of contemporary British cinema, The Goob is entirely non-metropolitan, established in a tightly knit and sequestered rural landscape with its own codes, protocols and ideas of moral justice, where London, or indeed any other decent-sized city, might just as well not exist.