Glenda Jackson appears briefly in the group singing round the piano at the Christmas party.
Richard Harris was a serious rugby player in real life, but of the union variety. He came from Limerick, sometimes called "the rugby capital of Ireland" and played for Garryowen FC, as well as various junior sides. He remained a fan of the Munster team his entire life, and used to go and watch matches with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. Unlike rugby league, up until the 1990s, the union code was strictly amateur, so Harris would not have been paid as Machin is.
Bernadette Benson, the eight-year-old actress who played Lynda Hammond, achieved newspaper publicity in her quest to be exempted from the film's X certificate which prohibited children under the age of 16 from seeing it. She said that it was perverse that she was able to see the rushes of the film as it was being made but was too young to be allowed to see the finished film at the cinema.
At the time of filming, Arthur Lowe and Anne Cunningham were appearing together in Coronation Street.
Because the budget would not stretch to the thousands needed for the rugby league match scenes at Belle Vue, director Lindsay Anderson deployed hundreds of wooden dummies to stand amongst the human extras for the crowd scenes.
Feature film debut of Edward Fox.
First cinema film of George Sewell.
In a scene in a nightclub, a young woman sings the Helen Shapiro hit "Walking Back to Happiness". She was 21-year-old mill-girl, Kim Leslie, from Pudsey. Producer Karel Reisz needed a Yorkshire woman for a small singing part in the film and advertised in the local papers. Within a few hours of the adverts appearing, 200 women had applied, from which a shortlist of four was selected. When these four women performed at the Wakefield Trinity rugby ground, the loudness of the crowd's applause was measured and Kim Leslie's performance was chosen.
It was William Hartnell's appearance in this film that brought him to the attention of Verity Lambert, producer of Doctor Who.
When Richard Harris is roughed up behind the scrum, rugby league legend Derek Turner, who was playing the character who punches him, was asked by the director to make the contact look real. So he did. He punched Harris for real and knocked him out completely, shooting for the day had to be stopped while Harris recovered.