Bleasdale (who described it as “an absurd, mad, black farce”) originally conceived Boys from the Blackstuff in 1978 during filming for The Black Stuff (directed by Jim Goddard), his single play introducing the Boys as a tarmac gang (hence the title) and culminating in their sacking for “doing a foreigner” (non-contract job). But while technically a sequel, Boys from the Blackstuff was a deeper and darker investigation of character and circumstance consisting of five linked plays of varying lengths (from 55 to 70 minutes). As such, it proved difficult to fit into the production and budgetary system of English Regions Drama. However, the delay to the production that this caused contributed significantly to the strength and originality of the final work, as well as providing a timely conjunction between its transmission and the apex of British unemployment.

To cut costs, the production was budgeted across two financial years, using newly available lightweight video equipment, except for one episode (“Yosser’s Story”) made on film with the unit’s annual film budget. Unusually for the time, the video episodes were edited in postproduction, and the series’ filmic qualities were further enhanced by Ilona Sekacz’s specially composed music and by the replacement of Goddard (no longer available) with Philip Saville, through whose elegant and inventive shooting style Liverpool’s dereliction took on a crumbling grandeur.

Of the five central characters, Chrissie (Michael Angelis) is the most ordinary (standing, perhaps, for Bleasdale himself), desperate for legitimate work and increasingly soured by the indignity and insecurity of life on the dole. Loggo (Alan Igbon), more defiant, stands as an ironic observer least affected by the experience. Dixie (Tom Georgeson), once the gang’s foreman, has become embittered and unforgiving, his pride as a working man shattered. George (Peter Kerrigan), much the oldest, represented the dignity of labor, wise and greatly respected as a trade union official, refusing to give up hope even on the remarkable wheelchair ride through the decaying Albert Dock that precedes his death—a scene that includes an emotional speech based partly on Kerrigan’s own experiences as a docker. But it was Bernard Hill’s maniacally self-destructive Yosser, a colossal performance of incoherence, savagery, and pathos, who captured the public imagination. Deprived of his dignity and eventually of his children, he is reduced to butting authority figures with the bewildered declaration: “I’m Yosser Hughes!” Yosser’s head-butts and his woeful “gizza job” became totems in the popular press.

The delay in production also benefited the series in enabling the script to develop through ruthless changes initiated by producer Michael Wearing. In the most extreme case, lamenting the absence of female and domestic perspectives on unemployment, Wearing returned the original episode 3 with an instruction to “write Angie.” In the rewrite, Angie (Julie Walters), Chrissie’s wife, emerged as a pivotal character. In an emotionally charged performance, she utters the lines that seem to sum up the series’ message about Liverpool and the dole: “It’s not funny, it’s not friggin’ funny. I’ve had enough of that ‘if you don’t laugh you’ll cry.’ I’ve heard it for years. This stupid soddin’ city’s full of it . . . . Why don’t you fight back, you bastard. Fight back.”

As well as pricking the national conscience (helping to dissolve the popular characterization of the unemployed as “scroungers”), Boys from the Blackstuff confirmed Bleasdale as one of the nation’s leading writers for stage and television, although his subsequent television work might have benefited from the editorial influence of Wearing. Equally important, it helped to put Liverpool on the map as a dramatic location of special significance, where brutality, decay, and poverty could serve as a backdrop for the expression, through darkly defiant wit, of the resilience and spirit of ordinary people. Its indirect influence is detectable in the proliferation of Liverpool-based television and film drama of the 1980s, including the sitcom Bread, resembling a travestied Boys from the Blackstuff stripped of its social conscience, and the long-running soap Brookside, which inherited its shooting style (single-camera shooting on lightweight video) as well as part of its milieu. Capitalizing on the success of such series and aided by the city’s thriving Film Office, Liverpool’s range of locations and local production expertise has brought it an international reputation as a location for the making of film and television drama.