‘The despair is the same’: Alan Bleasdale and James Graham on bringing back Boys from the Blackstuff

‘I’d find it easier to talk about James without him here’ … Bleasdale (right) and Graham at the Royal Court theatre in Liverpool. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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.”