Boys from the Blackstuff
1 9 8 2 (UK)
5 x 50 minute episodes
Beginning life in January 1980 as a single drama entitled The
Black Stuff, writer Alan Bleasedale's hard hitting black
comedy, set against the harsh backdrop of struggle and hopelessly
bleak unemployment in the Liverpool of Thatcher's Britain,
chronicled the lives of a group of tarmac layers as they sought to
find work, whilst suffering the despair and indignity of life on
the scrap heap.
Encouraged by the enthusiastic audience and critical reception
to the stand-alone play, the BBC approached former English teacher
Bleasedale with a request to create a linked series of plays
focusing on each of the central characters in turn.
BBC executives were so impressed with the end-result that they
ordered the first to be reworked into a one-off drama entitled The
Muscle Market, whilst the remaining five were melded into a
cohesive whole to form the series proper.
Bernard Hill's BAFTA winning depiction of the tragic decline of
Yosser Hughes was superb. Yosser had been systematically stripped
of job, pride and ultimately, his family, and reduced to a
shattered shell of the proud and self-confident man he had once
been.
The plight of the Yosser character, which all too painfully
mirrored the real life distress of millions of the nations
unemployed, was summed up in the hauntingly simple catch phrase,
which would almost immediately find a lasting place within the
vocabulary of the national consciousness. "Gizza job . . . I
can do that."
Although the series is best remembered for Hill's character
there was also a moving performance from Michael Angelis as
Chrissy Todd, a man reduced to looking down the back of the sofa
for money, whilst being constantly nagged by his wife (Julie
Walters), until finally, at the end of his tether he cracked up
and slaughtered his pet geese.
Dixie (Tom Georgeson), once the gang's foreman, had become
embittered and unforgiving, his pride as a working man shattered.
George (Peter Kerrigan), the oldest, was a wise and respected
trade union official who refused to give up hope even on the
remarkable wheelchair ride through the decaying Albert Dock which
precedes his death.
Like Cathy Come Home before it, Boys From The
Blackstuff had an impact on British society at large. It
painted an uncomfortable but nevertheless warranted portrait of a
city and a country teetering precariously on the brink of social
and economic disaster, where the only real victims were those who
were prevented by circumstances beyond their control from leading
fulfilling and productive lives.
The city of Liverpool and its people were never so faithfully
represented by television drama as they were in this series.
Its indirect influence is detectable in the proliferation of
Liverpool-based television and film drama of the 1980s, including
the sitcom Bread and the long-running soap Brookside.
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