The Sherwood creator writes about bringing the political drama back on stage.
This feature first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Plays for television – remember them? If you’re under the age of 35, then probably not.
Play for Today was a landmark drama series running from 1970 to 1984 that, week by week, presented a new single play for television audiences at home, aiming for mass appeal and written by playwrights who were often little known or undiscovered, but who would in many cases become household names.
Alan Bennett, Alan Plater, Alan Bleasdale (a lot of Alans), Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh, Beryl Bainbridge.
The format lent itself to – as pompous as this phrase can sound – “state of the nation” pieces. Single plays, for single issues. Characters wrestling with a particular condition they find themselves in, shining a light on the social issues of the day.
The most frequently cited example of a TV play that packed a political punch is, of course, Cathy Come Home, which was broadcast under the umbrella of the series’s predecessor, The Wednesday Play, in 1966.
Directed by Ken Loach and written by Jeremy Sandford, the hard-hitting story centred around a young working-class couple, Cathy and Reg, struggling with homelessness. It was a drama generating not just awareness, but “empathy” (the main superpower of a play) for people’s plight, by living through it with them.
One quarter of the entire nation – 12 million people at the time – tuned in to watch the broadcast. It cut through to the press and politicians, in a similar way to Mr Bates vs The Post Office in the modern day. MPs spoke about Cathy in the House of Commons, and the homelessness charity Crisis was created the next year.
Because single plays and dramas – back then, but also today – are lower risk for commissioners (in other words – cheaper), it meant that, invaluably, greater risks could be taken on newer and untested talent. Working-class writers, regional voices, bringing their experiences and outlook to the screen.
Liverpool seemed to do very well out of this. Beryl Bainbridge, the chain-smoking, blackly comic national treasure from its Allerton suburb, cut her teeth with a play in 1976. Willy Russell’s Our Day Out – a staple now of school shows everywhere – began life as a television play in 1976.
Then there’s Boys from the Black Stuff – Alan Bleasdale’s single play, originally broadcast in 1980, that would then become expanded into one of the most seminal and impactful television dramas of the late 20th century: 1982’s Boys from the Blackstuff.
The series dramatised the plight of unemployed former tarmac layers, a character per episode, five in total. Characters whose names now rattle with fond familiarity around the city – Chrissie, Dixie, Loggo, George and Yosser (the latter played by Bernard Hill, who passed away this month).
Yosser’s line “Gizza job” became a local catchphrase, chanted at football stadiums and beyond.
Again, this was an unapologetic presentation of the human cost and desperation of an economic experiment (the “managed decline” of Britain’s industrial base) that shocked an audience who had, in many places, been inoculated from having to think about the communities we now – and still – struggle to “level” back up.
It’s been the greatest privilege of mine, as a fellow writer, to return Blackstuff to its original form – a single play, adapted for the stage, that has been playing at the Liverpool Royal Court to packed houses before an upcoming transfer to London’s National Theatre and the West End over the summer.
One of the joys of it being produced in a theatre, all five stories merged into one, is the addition of a live audience’s raucous laughter, reminding you that, despite a reputation of being mercilessly tough, the piece’s wit and gallows humour give it life, and even hope.
It also reminds me how vulnerable the future is for such writers and stories. The appetite that audiences have for drama (now called “content”) has not diminished since those first plays over 2,000 years ago.
But the collapse of drama in state schools, the cuts coming to arts from local authorities and the loss of platforms like Play for Today make me deeply concerned about all the voices we could be losing in place of American streamer-style scale and gloss.
Yet for now, the voices of plays like Boys from the Black Stuff still resonate inside the communities they represented, and far beyond.
