The way we were... and unfortunately still are

A revival of Boys from the Blackstuff, the iconic Eighties television drama, brings home how little we have matured emotionally as a country

Barry Sloane as Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff. Picture by Alastair Muir.

At the end of the first night performance of Boys from the Blackstuff, Lord Kinnock stood up and applauded. I was seated sufficiently close to him in the National Theatre to see that tears were running down his face. Eighty-two years old now, he looked for a few moments forlorn and desolate.

I understood exactly how he was feeling. All of us who can think back to the early eighties, when Alan Bleasdale’s drama was first aired on BBC2, must have felt much the same. The series, about Liverpudlians struggling to survive as political ideology laid waste to their city and their lives, came to symbolise the Thatcher era. Unemployment was to reach more than three million and Bleasdale’s character Yosser Hughes was the embodiment of all of that human misery. The wilful sacrifice of so many people’s hopes and dreams on the high altar of Thatcherism seemed to be a matter of supreme indifference to the heart-hearted souls who then sat around the cabinet table in London.

In any enlightened, progressive society, Boys from the Blackstuff should, all these years on, be no more than an irrelevant relic of a cruel and heartless era. We should have heeded Bleasdale’s warning about where we were heading as a country and changed course. We should have heeded, too, the warning of Bleasdale’s contemporary Dennis Potter that Rupert Murdoch — helping to put Thatcher in office and more recently helping to facilitate Brexit and ‘Trussenomics’ — was a cancer that needed to be excised as a matter of urgency from our body politic.

Kinnock, who took charge of the Labour Party not long after the series first aired, clearly understood that nothing had actually changed at all. Boys from the Blackstuff could just as well pass as contemporary drama. Murdoch’s heart still beats, cold-hearted souls were still seated around the cabinet table until the election was called, and the rights of the working man still do not matter, certainly not when he stands in the way of profit, or, soon, tries to compete on cost with Artificial Intelligence.

Ideology still comes before people, and, if it further impoverishes them and opens up the chasm still more between rich and poor, then so be it. As leader of the oppostion during that time, Kinnock made a speech in which he warned his fellow countrymen and women about what hardline Conservative politics would mean for them. ‘I warn you,’ he said in that great oratorial voice of his as he contemplated a second term for Thatcher, ‘not to be ordinary; I warn you not to be young; I warn you not to fall ill; I warn you not to get old.’

That speech — just like Bleasdale’s drama — has just as much resonance today. So many lives have been blighted now by successive ideologies — after Thatcherism, there was austerity, Brexit, Trussonomics — and the rest and the greatest irony of all is that, for all that sacrifice, the country’s debt mountain has seldom, if ever, been higher and its economic prospects more bleak. Only a small handful of billionaire non doms seemed to enrich themselves still further as the Brexit sun shone down upon them.

As a young cub reporter on the Evening Echo in Bournemouth, I got to meet Kinnock when he was in town for the 1985 Labour conference. That was when he famously grasped hold of the podium in front of him and took on the Militant Tendency. Bravest speech I ever saw a politician make. I had got into a hotel lift at the same time as him and asked if I could have a chat and we ended up speaking for the best part of an hour. I learnt subsequently that his comms team had adopted a strategy of engaging at every opportunity with the regional press as they’d at that point all but given up getting a fair hearing from most of the nationals. I asked him then if he was hopeful about the future and he looked directly into my eyes and said ‘we just can’t go on as we are now, we just can’t keep treating each other like this indefinitely. At some point, I have faith that we will grow up.’

He got that wrong, of course, and that I suppose is why he cried and why everyone who remembered when Boys from the Blackstuff was first broadcast went home that night wondering why we never learned and felt a degree of shared guilt that we didn’t make the world any better for the young who have followed us.

It made it all the more poignant that the National should stage the drama within months of the deaths of Bernard Hill - who originated the part of Yosser Hughes - and his fellow Liverpudlian Bill Kenwright, the producer who was adamant that a new generation should see it and hopefully this time around learn from it. It’s telling that as Kenwright confronted an operation that he knew would almost certainly kill him, he made it his business to put on a succession of plays that seemed to have powerful messages for modern audiences. There was Twelve Angry Men, that stands as a warning against populism; Alone Together, warning against social media and a society that’s becoming increasingly lonely and dysfunctional; and he discreetly put money, too, into my play Bloody Difficult Women, which warned about how politicians - and the press - were trying to place themselves above the law.

Perhaps Boys from the Blackstuff, which later transfers to the Garrick Theatre in the West End, was closest to Kenwright’s great big Liverpudlian heart. It stands as a monument to how little we have learnt and grown up as a country. It testifies, too, to how we are no better at judging character. We make an Old Etonian layabout like Boris Johnson — despised in Liverpool for accusing the city of ‘wallowing’ in grief after the Hillsborough tragedy - prime minister. And we still as a society feel we can push around the Yossers of this world as they still just don’t matter.

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