It’s a dream team: the creator of the 1982 BBC series and the writer of Sherwood. The pair meet in Liverpool to discuss putting Yosser and the lads on stage in a new era of economic desperation
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.”