by The ironic tragedy of Yosser Hughes, the chronically unemployed asphalt worker in Alan Bleasdale’s play Boys From The Blackstuff, is that he screamed and cried in a vacuum. No one was listening. The great plea he now made to everyone, no one he took to the streets of Liverpool to “giz” him a job was heard and ignored. People, and indeed the world, turned their backs on Yosser, his despair and collapse of dignity too ugly and uncomfortable to watch.
It is therefore remarkable that more than 40 years later, after the death of Bernard Hill, the highly regarded British actor who played him, the much-respected Yosser achieves the rare feat that out in the mind of the nation, continuing to define and represent an entire era in the 1980s and a class of people who hold it as a joke, who are afraid of it and still proud of it. Symbol of disapproval, and warning.
We all know the form. When a beloved actor dies, there’s a dangerous tendency to reduce a long career to just one part. Modern social media can be quick to respond to hastily written writings, declaring themselves “known for their role in…” with cries and retorts on fan favorite parts to remember.
So it is true of Hill, who has had a varied and distinguished career on stage and screen, in Shakespeare and new plays, from British blockbusters such as Shirley Valentine to Hollywood behemoths such as Titanic and Lord of the Rings.
You also got the impression that Hill was tired, understandably, unable to swim the tarmac of the city he called his ‘second home’ without facing a stream of fans calling him Yosser phrases. “Giz job, go ahead, giz it, I can do that”.
This was a frustration, however, that subsided in later years, as his awareness grew not only of the importance of such a legacy, but of the sad resonance of the character’s desperation to this day. today.
It’s a resonance that comes across the walls of Liverpool Royal Court every night, where I – along with Alan Bleasdale – had the great privilege of adapting Boys From the Blackstuff for the stage here, before it travels to London’s National Theater and the West End this summer.
A privilege for me because, growing up in my own deindustrialized community, I saw how Yosser made sense of my own neighbors’ situation. I channeled my inner Bleasdale when I wrote Sherwood for the BBC, and pinched myself daily. that now I get to work with my idol. Sometimes you should meet your heroes…
Yosser is no hero. He is a complex and paradoxical man, violent and soft, a scary man and a scared child. He hates the world and loves his children. A single dad who hits lampposts and hugs his kids. He is broken, hit by a painful blow, by his unemployment and bureaucracy.
Why is Blackstuff important, today? And why did the outburst create affection for the Hill and Bleasdale character? After all, we no longer live in the world Yosser did – alongside Chrissie, Dixie, Loggo and George, the ‘Boys’ whose names are now as familiar to Liverpool folk as any street.
When a group from a youth theater came to see the play recently, they asked if it was really true that you couldn’t get a job back then. Their experience is that people now have to work some jobs. You need to do ‘too much’ work, too many jobs, to end a cost of living crisis, where wages have barely moved in the last decade.
But what they recognized is that this is where it all started. The origin of the ‘leveling up’ dilemma where entire industries disappear from an area and no investment or plans emerge to replace them.
Many wrongly believe that Blackstuff is up because of Bleasdale specifically to take down Thatcherism. Alan always points out that he started writing in 1978, under the Labor government. But certainly when the series aired in 1982 – whether one agrees or disagrees with the need for such corrective policies at the time – half the country watched in open-mouthed disbelief at a drama that showed the human cost of it all, and whether the other half felt that their lives had finally been seen.
Yosser himself was essentially a Thatcherite, rejecting George’s more community-minded collectivism (of old Peter Kerrigan). In 1978’s first Play For Today which gave birth to the anthology series, Yosser believes that if someone is smart enough and ambitious enough like him, he will succeed. He didn’t want handouts, he wanted to stand proudly on his own two feet.
The black stuff has never been overtly left wing, my bone of contention is demanding sympathy for those on benefits. The cruelty of the system that drove Yosser mad was that here were hardworking men, proud of their trade as tractors who ‘laid the roads’, bought to their knees by forces beyond their control, and suffered the wrath of the weekly visits to the City. dole office where they were told they must get a job but there was none.
Hill’s death also reminds us of a time when working-class actors and writers like himself could rise to the top of their industry. There was clearly something in the water in Liverpool in the 70s and 80s. Among the community of artists who gathered in the Everyman Theater bar in Hope Street alongside Hill and Bleasdale were Julie Walters, Bill Nighy and Pete Postlethwaite, the playwright Willy Russell and the musician Barbara Dickson. This is where they were determined to have a voice, to tell their stories. Blackstuff was indeed a family business. Yosser’s own children play at Bleasdale’s own children, who saw Hill as someone else’s father, with everyone always around everyone else’s houses.
In fact, Hill did his Yosser research by working for a few weeks as a blacksmith with Bleasdale’s brother-in-law, who was himself a paver. Bleasdale fondly remembers how the tarmac layers were very suspicious of this emerging actor, but in the end he was very successful. Yosser was right after all. He could do that. So much so that Hill would be back laying the black stuff with the boys between acting jobs to pay his way. A case of life imitating art.
If Yosser’s legacy is one of hopelessness, Hill’s should be one that reminds us of the value of art and culture in regional working-class communities. It was a story that needed to be told.
Yosser’s pleas went unheard. But courtesy of Hill’s fierce, authentic and humane performance, his antics have echoed through the years.
‘Boys From the Blackstuff’ is at Liverpool Royal Court until May 11 (liverpoolsroyalcourt.com), then at London’s National Theater from 22 May to 8 June (nationaltheatre.org.uk) and the Garrick Theatre
from 13 June – 8 August (boysfromtheblackstuff.com)
