You’ve been good. You’ve kept your alcohol level low. No embarrassing mishaps, no incidents to regret in the morning. You ease off the pedal. A large whisky—why not? Then it happens: the unmistakable, faintly sinister opening bars of “Agadoo.” Before you can protest, you’re hauled onto the dance floor, and within minutes your inhibitions are scattered somewhere near the bar. It’s a familiar tableau, replayed in community halls and social clubs across Britain every weekend—the collective surrender to kitsch, the comfort of a song many claim to loathe but secretly know by heart – and even know the moves.
Tull Stories and Labor of Love Films are set to release Still Pushing Pineapples, the latest from Kim Hopkins, whose A Bunch of Amateurs quietly became a modern classic of British documentary. The new film—funny, tender, and unflinchingly human—opens in U.K. cinemas on November 28.
Its unlikely hero is Dene Michael, once of Black Lace, the 1980s pop duo behind “Agadoo,” that indelible (and, depending on your temperament, unbearable) party anthem. Decades later, Dene is still on the road—performing for dwindling audiences in England’s fading seaside towns, clinging to the dream that there might yet be another hit. Hopkins follows him, his irrepressible eighty-nine-year-old mother, Anne, and his sharp-tongued girlfriend, Hayley, from Yorkshire to the Costa del Sol on a road trip equal parts comedy and elegy.
Still Pushing Pineapples opened this year’s Sheffield DocFest to warm acclaim and will preview at Bradford’s Pictureville cinema on November 14, as part of Bradford’s 2025 U.K. City of Culture celebrations. It’s a film about entertainment and endurance, nostalgia and grit—a portrait of Britain’s working-class showbiz spirit refusing to fade quietly.
Hopkins, an award-winning, queer, working-class filmmaker and graduate of the National Film and Television School, co-founded Labor of Love Films with producer Margareta Szabo. She calls Still Pushing Pineapples the second in a trilogy about self-expression, solidarity, and the art of escape.
“When Black Lace hit Top of the Pops with ‘Agadoo,’ I dismissed it as junk,” Hopkins admits. “But every summer since, it’s come back—unstoppable. Returning to Yorkshire, I began to understand why: working-class people need to escape. When I told my family I wanted to make a film about it, they lit up. Alexa started blasting party tunes. They wanted to know the whole story.”
Hopkins gives them—and us—exactly that: a story about fame, family, and the irresistible pull of a song that refuses to die.
