Blackstuff From Long Ago
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/boys.htm
Over the last few weeks we've been watching 'Boys From The Blackstuff', Alan Bleasedale's hyper-bleak nutter-sweet social drama from the early eighties, charting the lives of the unemployed and dying of Liverpool's docks.
Ninety-nine percent of television presents a fantasy world that the viewer would want to visit. From the hyper-clean BBC Newsrooms to the X-Factor finale and period dramas, they show times and places that we can escape to because they are safely removed from our own existence, by one step or more.
Yet there seems little reason to want to escape to the endless unemployed hell that's portrayed in Boys From The Blackstuff. The episode 'Shop Thy Neighbour' was the hardest one to watch, because it focused entirely on Chrissie's deteriorating home life. We see Chrissie tearing apart the sofa, looking for money. He finds a fiver and goes out to spend it on drink while his kids are going hungry. Things get a lot worse when his wife complains that they're all hungry, so Chrissie heads out into the back yard and starts slaughtering their pets, a flock of geese, ferrets and pigeons. Finally he grabs a shotgun and blows the head off one of the geese. And after all that, the heartwarming denouement where the husband and wife reconcile is the line 'Somebody better wash the blood off that rabbit'.
It's all the worse because Chrissie is one of the most human and sympathetic characters in the series. Watching him suffer is deeply painful.
By contrast, some of the other episodes have some moments of levity. The episode 'Jobs For The Boys' is quite fun, appearing to show a gang of cheeky dole cheats working on a building site. It comes to a head as the snouts spring a trap on them and they rush to escape... and the idealistic 'Snowy' Malone gets killed while trying to abseil to safety out of a window. There's an irony because he tried tying one end of his rope to the very hand-rail that he was complaining was shoddily made earlier in the episode. The hand-rail can't support his weight and he falls to his death. Although the irony seems irrelevant, because the death of 'Snowy' is so brutal and unexpected.
Slightly lesser but still powerful is the episode 'Moonlighter', which shows how trapped into weakness people can be. Dixie tries to do a good job as a dockside security guard, but doesn't stand a chance against a gang of thieves. They even give him a pair of boots from the spoils, which he ends up wearing.
For all the anger and frustration, the episodes seem to show that these people have a choice - they can either try to hold on to their dignity or descend into madness. This is shown clearly in 'Yosser's Story', where Bernard Hill goes completely insane, head-butting his way through the world.
But it's strange to think how things have changed now. That generation has grown old. In 'George's Last Ride', Chrissie takes George on a ride around the derelict Liverpool dock yard. Look at it today and it's a thriving commercial area with restaurants and shopping centres. It was strange to see George standing up for one last time and saying 'I can't believe there's no hope!' outside a building where we once had a nice cup of tea.
But the honest work of shipbuilding is long gone. George reminisces about the days of integrity, when there were truly working class heroes. In that last episode, there's a group of young people in a pub singing 'Imagine' by John Lennon. In itself, it would be hard to imagine teenagers singing such a politically charged song today.
Nearly everyone turns up for George Malone's funeral, emphasising the sense of community that they shared. As George's funeral procession drove down the street, most of the people came out to see him off. In some ways, that sense of community is appealing. The way we work and the focus of our lives has changed, perhaps for better or for worse. These plays highlight how much society has changed in thirty years.
Now you can have your Yosser Hughes T-shirt. I wonder what Alan Bleasdale makes of it all?