[CHANNEL 4 has opened with a claim to…]

Scan page 11

CHANNEL 4 has opened with a claim to give the news from new angles - including the left. We shall see.

Meanwhile television drama continues to show occasional brilliance in capturing the struggle of the working class.

The plays are usually put on late at night when the children are safely out of the way of its influence. So it was with Boys from the Blackstuff' , Alan Bleasdale's remarkable return to the characters he depicted so brilliantly in a one-off play a few years ago.

His six stories took the energies of the Merseyside road gangers whose attempts to get rich had gone so disastrously wrong, and set them against the background sA: iA: of Mrs Thatcher's 1982. Unemployed, harassed by social security snoopers, beaten up by police, held together by a sense of community rather than family, by humour, and by a determined optimism called into question only at the last.

The final episode saw the death of George - the former militant convenor of the Liverpool docks - from cancer. He was pushed by his son down to the docks where he saw his first ship. His final words were, "Those days of long ago, they stil give me hope and faith in my class. I can't believe there is no hope"

His wife had earlier shouted at her sons, who were blaming workers for refusing to come out on strike, that they were defeatPeter Mcintyre reviews 'Boys from the Blackstuff' shown recently on Sundays on BBC2 ist. "I won't have such talk in my house"

George is buried in a scene which was a brilliant attack on the church. As hundreds of mourners pack into the church, the priest his wrong name (the under tries to bury George he was baptised under), and is then stopped in his tracks by George's son when he starts spouting about the Kingdom of Heaven..

"You are not on. We didn't come here to listen to this"

Later the priest is seen vomiting into the gutter after getting smashed at the reception.

Two of the former gangers go for a drink and find themselves in a pub where everyone is round the twist, performing strange routines in complete isolation from the world around them. The publican - rapidly going the same way himself - points at each in turn, naming the factory from which he was made redundant.

Chrissie, leaving the pub gives a final twist to George's optimism, saying, "You know what he stood for. Yeah, well that's dead and all this This struggle between optimism and pessimism is at the heart of a series of plays which always seemed to be on the brink of going over the top.

The social security snooper trying to trap her victim by selling her expensive make-up through the letter box, the revolutionary falling to his death trying to escape from a raid, when the one modern part of a Victorian building gave way: Yosser Hughes - surely the performance of the year by Bernard Hill - trailing his children in his wake as he pounced on hapless passers by with his keening monologue: "Gi' us a job. gi' us a job. I could do that. I can carry things"

But director Philip Swithe and Bleasdale always held it together with a blend of black humour and tragedy that have rarely been combined to such good affect. It wasn't so much that you didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but that you were trying to do both at the same time.

Scenes would switch from total realism to set piece staginess. Yosser's children were to be taken into care. He barricaded them in the house while the social workers tried to persuade him to come out, talking through the letter box.

The next minute a gang of ape-like policemen had charged through the back door - "You don't reason with shite" - and beat Yosser to pulp while the goggleeyed social workers protested feebly through the window. It captured symbolically the relationship between the 'caring' side of the state and its armed bodies of men.

I am sure Alan Bleasdale would react against any attempt to characterise his plays in terms of a precise political message. It seemed to me however that he had perhaps caught the synthesis between optimism and despair which breeds the next major upsurge of working class anger.

+ is better,. of course, hat revolutionaries and socialists should keep their optimism, but the iron will of the class is forgea somewhere between the two.

This series should be repeated, quickly, often, and at prime time.

Scan page 12

Socialist Organiser no. 108 November 11 1982 Page 12 108 November Page