James Graham: why Boys From the Blackstuff’s most tragic character remains relevant to this day

The ironic tragedy of Yosser Hughes, the chronically unemployed asphalter in Alan Bleasdale’s drama Boys From The Blackstuff, is that he was screaming and wailing into a void. No one was listening. His now legendary plea to everyone, anyone he passed in the streets of Liverpool to “giz” him a job went unheard and ignored. People, and indeed the world turned their back on Yosser, his desperation and the collapse of his dignity was too ugly and uncomfortable to look at.

It’s remarkable then that, over 40 years on, following the announcement of the death of Bernard Hill, the deeply admired British actor who played him, the disregarded Yosser achieves that rare feat of remaining deep in the mindset of the nation, continuing to define and represent an entire era in the 1980s and a class of people who hold on to him as a mascot, to be feared and yet be proud of. A symbol of defiance, and a warning.

We all know the form. When a cherished actor passes away, there is a dangerous tendency to reduce a long career to one single part. Modern social media can be quick to react to hastily written write-ups ,declaring so-and-so as being “known for their role in…” with cries and retorts of the parts the fans would prefer them to be remembered by.

So it is true of Hill, who had a varied and distinguished career on stage and screen, in Shakespeare and new plays, from hit British films like Shirley Valentine to Hollywood behemoths such as Titanic and Lord of the Rings.

You also got the sense that Hill grew understandably weary of being unable to tread the tarmac of the city he called his ‘second home’ without facing a stream of fans parroting Yosser’s catchphrases at him. “Giz a job, go on, giz it, I can do that”.

This was, however, a frustration that mellowed in later years, as his awareness grew of not only the importance of such a legacy, but the sad resonance the character’s despair still carries for desperate people to this day.

It’s a resonance that reverberates around the walls of the Liverpool Royal Court every night, where I – alongside Alan Bleasdale - have had the great privilege of adapting Boys From the Blackstuff for the stage here, before it makes its journey to London’s National Theatre and the West End this summer.

A privilege for me because, growing up in my own de-industrialised community, I saw how Yosser made sense of the situation that my neighbours found themselves in. I channelled my inner-Bleasdale when I wrote Sherwood for the BBC, and pinch myself daily that I now get to work with my idol. Sometimes you should meet your heroes…

Yosser is no hero. He is a complicated and paradoxical man, violent and soft, a frightening man and a scared child. He hates the world and loves his children. A single dad who headbutts lampposts and hugs his children. He is broken, beat by painful beat, by his joblessness and bureaucracy.

Why does Blackstuff matter, today? And why the outpouring of affection for the character Hill and Bleasdale created? After all, we no longer live in the world that Yosser did – alongside Chrissie, Dixie, Loggo and George, the ‘Boys’ whose names are as familiar now to the people of Liverpool as any street.

When a group from a youth theatre came to watch the play recently, they asked if it was really true that you couldn’t find a job back then. Their experience is that people now have to work several jobs. You almost have to do ‘too much’ work, too many jobs, to make ends meet in a cost of living crisis where wages have barely moved for a decade.

But what they did recognise is that this is where it all began. The origins of the ‘levelling up’ dilemma where entire industries disappear from an area and no investment or plans arrive to replace them.

Many wrongly hold Blackstuff up as Bleasdale’s take-down of Thatcherism specifically. Alan is always quick to point out he began writing it in 1978, under a Labour government. But certainly the time the series aired in 1982 – whether one agrees or disagrees with the need for such correctional policies at the time – one half of the country watched open-mouthed in disbelief at a drama displaying the human cost of it all, and the other half felt their lives were finally being seen.

Yosser himself was basically a Thatcherite, rejecting the collectivism of the more community-minded George (played by veteran Peter Kerrigan). In the original Play For Today of 1978 that gave birth to the anthology series, Yosser believes that if an individual is smart enough and ambitious enough like him, then he will thrive. He didn’t want handouts, he wanted to stand proudly on his own two feet.

Blackstuff was never some overtly left-wing, hang-wringing woe-is-me whinge demanding sympathy for those on benefits. The cruelty of the system that drove Yosser mad was that here were hard-working men, proud of their craft as tarmacers who ‘laid the roads’, bought to their knees by forces beyond their control, and suffered the indignity of weekly visits to the dole office where they were told that they must get a job but that there weren’t any.

Hill’s death also reminds us of a time when working-class actors and writers like himself could rise to the very top of their industry. Something was obviously in the water in Liverpool in the 70s and 80s. The community of artists that gathered in the bar of the Everyman Theatre in Hope Street alongside Hill and Bleasdale included Julie Walters, Bill Nighy and Pete Postlethwaite, the playwright Willy Russell and musician Barbara Dickson. Here was a place determined to have a voice, to tell their stories. Indeed, Blackstuff was a family affair. Yosser’s children are played by Bleasdale’s own kids, who saw Hill as another father figure, with everyone always being round everyone else’s houses.

Hill, in fact, did his Yosser research by working for a few weeks as a black stuff layer with Bleasdale’s brother in-law, who was himself an asphalter. Bleasdale remembers fondly how the tarmac layers were very suspicious of this actor turning up, but by the end he became very good at it. Yosser was right after all. He could do that. So much so that in between acting jobs, Hill would return to laying the black stuff with the boys to pay his way. A case of life imitating art.

If Yosser’s legacy is one of hopelessness, then Hill’s should be one that reminds us of the value of art and culture in regional, working-class communities. His was a story that needed to be told.

Yosser’s pleas went unheard. But courtesy of Hill’s ferocious, authentic and humane portrayal, his howls of anguish echo through the decades.

‘Boys From the Blackstuff’ is at Liverpool’s Royal Court until May 11 (liverpoolsroyalcourt.com), then at London’s National Theatre from May 22-June 8 (nationaltheatre.org.uk) and Garrick Theatre 
from June 13-August 8 (boysfromtheblackstuff.com)