Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff opened up a Britain few viewers knew. “I’d been writing it for three years,” remembers Bleasdale, 77. “Walking around Liverpool, it was obvious mass unemployment was coming, but they didn’t realise in London. The BBC was initially reluctant to have a long series about these northern unemployed.”
In the 1982 drama, a group of Liverpudlian road layers struggling to make money are pursued by “sniffers” from the local employment office, which is trialling a Thatcher government initiative to reduce benefits. UK unemployment topped 3 million before the premiere of the series, whose character Yosser Hughes (played by Bernard Hill), a single father of three, pleads: “Gizza job. I can do that.”
Boys from the Blackstuff has now been theatricalised by James Graham, whose works include the BBC’s Sherwood, which was about the long consequences of another Thatcher legacy – the 1984 miners’ strike – on the Nottinghamshire community where Graham, 41, grew up.
Some TV reviewers compared Sherwood to Bleasdale’s show. So with the two writers side by side in the bar of the Royal Court in Liverpool, where Boys from the Blackstuff is being staged, I ask Graham if he intended that connection.
“Yes. That was very conscious,” he says. “I wanted it to be my own story, inspired by events that happened in my own community, but the template in my head was everything Alan had done. I watched a run-through last week, and there’s a song about ‘laying the roads, laying the roads’. And that’s what Alan did for me.”
Because of sight impairment caused by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), Bleasdale has bought successive TVs “taking up more and more of the wall”, and it was on the latest maxi-screen that he and his wife, Julia, caught Sherwood: “We watched it, and …” Bleasdale, a naturally emotional man, as his work shows, tears up. “Yeah, we watched it.”
He recovers himself: “I’d find it easier to talk about James without him here.” Perhaps uniquely in showbiz, this would allow him to be more adulatory behind a colleague’s back.
Graham smoothly fills the pause: “What I took most from Alan was his challenging of the cliche of how working-class people express themselves.” Bleasdale is nodding. “They are lyrical and articulate and humorous and emotional – and that’s what Alan showed in these characters. And I wanted that in this and in Sherwood.”
Blackstuff has had a long road to the Liverpool venue, which was a leading opera house in the late 18th century but subsequently became more unsung. “I remember coming here in the 1980s and 90s when it stunk of piss,” says Bleasdale. “It was a wreck of a place. It was a comedy club and a rock’n’roll venue. Elvis Costello played here a lot. But Kevin Fearon took it over and turned it into a comedy and theatre place. Every New Year’s Day for many years, Kevin rang up and said: ‘I want to do Boys from the Blackstuff on stage this year.’ And I said: ‘You can’t, because I don’t know how to do it.’”
Five years ago, the director Kate Wasserberg suggested Graham as an adapter to Bleasdale, who recalls: “I knew James had two plays on in the West End at the time [Quiz and Ink] so he must be a bit good.” Bleasdale then read his earlier work, including This House. “Basically, I rang up and pleaded for him to do it.”
The men met in a Chinese restaurant in Liverpool’s Cultural Quarter. Graham says: “The idea was to explore our sense of what a stage play could be. But really I just wanted to meet Alan.”
Bleasdale: “They say never meet your heroes – and now he knows why.” They have developed the easy rhythm of a double act.
On the table between us I have Graham’s adaptation and an old paperback of the Boys from the Blackstuff scripts. “That’s useful,” says Graham, “because we keep forgetting now who wrote what in which bit.”
Bleasdale: “One of the actors said to me the other day: ‘Did you write this?’ and I said: ‘I don’t know!’”
Graham: “If something goes wrong, we both say: ‘Was that my fault?’”
Prior to the series, The Blackstuff was a 1980 one-off TV play that introduced the characters during a road-laying stint in Middlesbrough that went wrong, increasing their poverty and job insecurity. The script is unpublished but Graham got a copy from Bleasdale’s archive and has interpolated scenes as flashbacks. “That’s something I’d never have done. Which is why he wrote the stage version and I didn’t,” says Bleasdale.
Graham explains: “That first play was important to me. It’s about how these men became mates, and about when Yosser wasn’t quite so damaged and believed he could be something. So I wanted all that in.”
Bleasdale based that first TV film on something that happened to relatives. “It wasn’t as dramatic as in the film, but the basics were there,” he says. “So yes, I would not have had anything resembling what is laughingly called my career if I hadn’t had the good fortune to marry a woman from a family whose male members were all asphalters. Indeed, my brother-in-law is coming in tomorrow to show the actors how to lay a road.”
Graham’s largest alteration to the material is a more external perspective on the history of Liverpool: how the depth and width of the Mersey, for example, doomed it to decline when container ships got bigger.
Bleasdale: “When I read the scripts. I realised James had seen things about the city that I hadn’t. And it’s because I live here.”
Graham: “I did what I always do when I’m scared, which is read books and documentaries and get a long view of the story. Alan already had it but I really wanted to make Liverpool a character because these people are stuck in an inheritance – geographical, political, cultural.”
Celebrated lines and scenes from the TV series survive, including Yosser going to confession in the Catholic cathedral and, thanks to a matey priest who wishes to be on first-name terms rather than called “father”, ends up pleading: “I’m desperate, Dan.” In the stage version, though, Yosser carries on down Hope Street to the Anglican cathedral and seeks advice from a vicar – an unlikely step in a city of tribal faith, but reflecting Graham’s long-declared dramatic credo of showing both sides? “Yes. I do enjoy doing that,” says Graham.
Bleasdale: “I would never have done it. But I am happy it’s being done on my behalf.”
Graham: “It was about giving a sense of the whole city – and also I wanted to see if I could write an Alan Bleasdale scene. It was almost like listening to Alan’s music, pressing pause and seeing if I could continue the tune.”
Bleasdale’s memories of shooting the show reveal that poverty was not just its subject but the production subtext. The producer, Michael Wearing, “had to beg, borrow and steal to make it happen. This might amuse you. The camera crew on all those episodes – except Yosser’s Story, which was shot on film – were from Match of the Day. They loved being on a drama. That scene where Yosser breaks down and can’t take any more? We’d run out of money for two days of exterior filming we couldn’t afford, so the producer said, ‘Just write something in a room.’ I wrote it at nine o’clock at night, gave it to Bernard Hill at 11 and he filmed it next morning.”
Bleasdale and director Philip Saville had a fractious relationship, partly because the Hampstead-born Saville struggled with the word “dole”, saying it “doll”. However, his pronouncements on drama were astute: “Phil came to my house and said, ‘I think episodes one, two, four and five are great, but here’s three back: write me a woman’s role.’ Bleasdale had just worked with Julie Walters on a stage play and created the character of Angie for her – including one of the great marital rows in drama, with her husband, Chrissie (played by Michael Angelis).
The series started on Sunday 10 October 1982, on BBC Two. Bleasdale is a reluctant traveller, but on the Monday morning he had girded himself to go by train from Liverpool via Manchester to Sheffield to start rehearsals of a stage play, It’s a Mad House. “This is the only time it has ever happened to me,” the writer says, “but people on the trains were talking about it. Same thing happened on the Monday mornings after episodes two and three. Then the play opened, and I never found out what they thought about Yosser’s Story or George’s Last Stand.”
We might have hoped that economic desperation and benefits crackdowns would be distant history, but they are hotly topical today. Bleasdale: “Different things are happening. But the same people are getting shat on.”
Graham: “We technically have very low unemployment – although the stats are complicated. But clearly there are huge issues of quality of life, job security and wealth inequality. The circumstances differ but the despair is the same. During the run of our show, the Labour party conference will gather here in Liverpool and ask: ‘What do we want to do and why?’ This is the time to ask those questions.”
The younger writer is commuting between Merseyside, rehearsals for the West End transfer of his Gareth Southgate play Dear England in London, and Chichester, where Quiz is being revived. The elder dramatist hasn’t had a screen credit since The Sinking of the Laconia on BBC One in 2010, and isn’t expecting one. He spent a decade adapting Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities as a 10-part series: “It was bought by so many companies but never got made. Another of those stories that every writer has. So I’m retired now, mainly because of my eyes. I won’t see this play; it’ll be the radio version for me. Apart from the AMD, I’ve also got a thing called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which means I have hallucinations. I see words but can’t decipher them. But here’s the thing that might amuse your readers: those words are in the Guardian type font.”
• Boys from the Blackstuff is at Liverpool’s Royal Court until 28 October.
