Alan Bleasdales hugely acclaimed Bafta winning series has never been more relevant, it echoes the misery and despair of long-term unemployment. Set in Liverpool, these profoundly moving human dramas follow in turn the attempts of five working-class heroes to survive.
Gizza job. I can do that. All you gotta do is walk in a straight line Yosser Hughes, systematically stripped of job, pride and ultimately, his family, was to become one of the 80s great characters in TVs most articulate response to the Thatcher era. Includes the Play for Today as well as the complete BBC TV series that swept the awards board in 1982 and has been talked about ever since. Alan Bleasdales chronicles of the lives of a group of tarmac layers – Chrissie (with a powerful performance by Julie Walters as his wife, Angie), Loggo, Dixie, George and Yosser – bitterly dramatised the frustrations suffered by a fruitless search for work and an antagonistic social security system. Though harrowing and uncompromising, the stories, laced with scouse wit and humour became a seminal series.
Alan Bleasdales Boys from the Blackstuff gripped television audiences in 1982 with its bleak, fiercely funny exploration of the effect of the UKs economic depression on a group of Merseyside characters, originally introduced in his 1978 play, The Blackstuff. Bleasdales writing is unsparing in both its pain and its unconditional affection for characters being pushed to the very limit of civilisation. Yosser Hughes (the outstanding Bernard Hill) is still, and rightly, recognised as one of the great creations of modern television drama: a man on the brink of madness, unlikeable, ostracised, digging a deeper hole with every desperate act, but ultimately a human being deserving our sympathy.
The performances are wonderful throughout: particularly Peter Kerrigan as Malone, the once giant union leader reduced to a shadow but still with the spark that commands love and respect Michael Angelis as Chrissie and, in a typically sharp cameo, Julie Walters as his wife. My dreams still give me hope and faith in my class. I cant believe theres no hope, says Chrissie towards the end. And its testament to Bleasdales skill and the resilience of his characters that somehow, that flicker of hope remains unextinguished.
The blackstuff–the tarmac–of the title becomes increasingly ironic. There is none. The boys have no work. The dole office scenes have a grimly nostalgic, documentary quality. Each second drips another droplet of disillusionment on people whose expectations are crushed by every effort to haul themselves up. Thatchers Britain was a cruel place for many people. The unspoken question that hangs in the air after watching Bleasdales poetic dissection of ruined lives is, have things really changed that much Television drama doesnt come any more powerful or honest than this.
