A world at the end of its tether

Scan page 13

WE ALL need reminding sometimes of the tremendous impact of television on popular consciousness. For more and more people the printed word matters less and less.

Labour doesn't only need a daily paper. It needs its own television channel.

Nonetheless in a wore were even the high spots of Coronation Street or Dallas are instantaneously obsolescent, and where the evidence of serious television drama related to contemporary political problems is slight and its impact negligible, it is surprising to find the BBC drama series The Boys from the Blackstuff still a talking point in homes, workplaces, pubs and clubs long after its second showing.

The indomitable figure of Yosser Hughes has entered the pantheon of modern folk heroes. 'Giz a job' and 'I can do that' have bcome instantly recognisable parts of modern street lore, and his fondness for the violent use of his head has meant in Liverpool what was formerly termed a "Kirkby kiss' is now called a 'Yosser Hughes':

Whilst plays which challenge and subvert the status quo from time to time appear on television - the Loach/Garnett/Allen films are perhaps the best examples -they rarely have had anything like the resonance beyond the circles of the already politically interested, committed or active, of Alan Bicasdale's cycle.

The plays have probably done more to publicise the plight of Britain's unemployed, the coercion and oppression they suffer from the state, the impotence and desperation people are feeling in our devastated cities, than a thousand leafiets or newspaper articles.

The central reason for this is quite simply that the five plays constitute a major artistic achievement. With the help of brilliant casting, acting, production and direction, Alan Bleasdale has succeeded in capturing in all its complexity and contradiction the real universe millions inhabit in Britain today as the working class is caught in the decline of the system that created it.

Where television so often lies, Bleasdale tells the truth. He creates working class life as it is lived. He shows vividly what Thatcher"The indomitable figure of Yosser Hughes has entered the pantheon of modern folk heroes' . But does it represent a radical challenge to the status quo - or just a statement of despair?

John Mcilroy continues the discussion on Alan Bleasdale's celebrated TV ism does to human beings, what mass unemployment does to any sense of worth or dignity.

Researchers touch on a reality beyond statistics when they claim tat one per cent on the unemployment figures means up to four per cent on admissions to mental hospitals, four per cent on the suicide rate and a fixe per cent increase in murders.

It is because Bleasdale captures the psycho-drama of Liverpool in the '80s and compellingly portrays the range of reality, the rage, the desperation, the futility and the resistance of the maimed and wrecked citizens of this world at the end of its tether that millions have been convinced, imaginatively involved, emotionally engaged.

Weeks after the plays it is easy to recall the horror when the young.socialist, Snowy, worn but still defiant, goes to a ridiculous wasted death, the passionate grief of his father, George Malone, as he visits the grave, the anguish of the bitter, wrenching conflict between Chrissie and Angie, and the despair as he destroys the pets which, with drink, were his only solace.

Or the joy which lights up and rejuvenates the beaten features of George's wife when the doctor treating the old socialist asks whether he was the same George he heard addressing a mass meeting when he was a boy.

Or the jolt of sickly surprise when the old security guard, the one pillar of rectitude and conventional morality in the corrupt world of the docks, is revealed as the organiser of the heist - rotten beneath the facade.

Or the final ray of optimism when Yosser, a sane figure in the maa pub, lays Shakehands' on the floor in an attirmation of the necessity to continue the struggle and the residual power to do this.

If Bleasdale had merely illuminated in all its oppressive detail the system under which the unemployed exist, he woula have deserved our gratitude. He shows us what the welfare state has become. Thrown onto the dole the victims are unable to exist on its handouts.

The authorities, the social service bureaucracies, are there to see that they do. Everybody with a job in the plays is an agent of discipline and control, whether the police themselves, the social security clerks, the Department of Employment snoopers, or the social workers.

Whatever their own beliefs, the apparatus forces them into an oppressive role. By linking his characters' responses to his description of the state's creation and • institutionalisation of helpless poverty, Bleasdale links private suffering to public issues, the personal to the political.

The real strength of the plays lies in their depiction of the spectrum of responses. Chrissie gives in. He takes refuge in the old Liverpudlianism, 'You have to be a comedian to live here' But as his wife Angie says, 'It's not funny. It is 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 cry? Why don't you scream? Why don't you fight back, you bastard, fight back'.

Stuffing

But Chrissie doesn't. The stuffing has been knocked out of him. Despite pleading he fails to negotiate his way back into the other world of steady jobs and remains locked into his mutually destructive struggle with Angie.

Dixie enters the path of rolling with the punches and beating the system. Throughout this episode there is the taste of fear. He moonlights for a security firm and embarks on a war of manoeuvre with the DHSS.

He is bribed and bludgeoned into cooperating with the rifling of the ship he is paid to guard. And, like Chrissie, his family life is devastated. Where one of the characters. earlier claims in response to Snowy's militant preaching, 'Don't you think we know all that stuff... but at times like this you look to your own' mad. Unlike Dixie and Chrissie he has not been turned in on his own. His family has to be physically destroyed by the state.

Even when Yosser wants to give in, wants to kill himself, wants to accept that resistance is futile, he can't. His suicide bid fails: If everything that is worthwhile in humanity is to be preserved, you have to go on fighting. You can't cop out.

But if Bleasdale is not ultimately pessimistic, does not believe the game is up in a hopeless world, still Yosser's struggle is individual and demented. The tradition of collective, explicitly political struggle is represented by George Malone, his wife, and his son Snowy. The tide is running strongly against that tradition.

In the first plays the workers on the site discuss politics, the riots, unemployment, the Tories. But the view is pessimistic. One of the characters complains, "Everything's gone sour. Everyone looking after number one. We're not winning any more... Your beliefs go out the window when the bailiffs are at the door' George's other sons articulate the feeling of many trade union activists today. I'm telling you da, honest to God. Sometimes I look around at some of the fellas I'm supposed to be fighting for, and they don't seem to care or understand about anything that hasn't got tits or comes out of a barrel' They are answered by their mother, who exclaims that she and George have spent a lifetime struggling against defeatism. The point is to keep resisting even when you are not winning.

Rocky

ther redundancy party' puts its £1000 down on the bar to drink away defeat.

The last play in the series is a key one for socialists. George, who represents all that was best about his class, takes a last ride in a wheelchair past the silent cranes, the decaying warehouses and dying docks, where the Liverpool proletariat was forged, recalling in a final monologue old battles and old friendships with a delight and warmth which turns cold in the face of the present reality.

But George rages against that reality, crying, over and over again, I can't believe there's no hope for my class...

It is not the playwright's job to provide answers, and Bleasdale doesn't. We can all certainly recognise an important truth in the play's argument. The unions have failed thousands.

The Labour Party appears all too often and culpably irrelevant to the preoccupations of those trapped by our economic and social crisis in the Kirkbys, Dingles and the Garstons.

Do the leaders of our party. and unions really understand the world of the Chrissies, Dixies and Yossers? Do they really know what is going on?

Many of us will have our doubts, but we will still disagree with the play's conclusions. We cannot go on in the old ways. But the tradition of George Malone is not irrelevant to the concerns of Britain's unemployed. It should not be written off.

It does need development. It does need revitalising. But there are answers, there are ways out for the Chrissies, Dixies and Yossers. Fundamental social change in the interests of the working class is still possible. To achieve it we have to start with the tools at hand. And despite their inadequacies - and god knows they are numerous - those tools are still the unions and the Whilst we should not demand of drama which enriches people's lives, illuminates reality, and explains us to ourselves, that it should have a neat political message tagged on, the exclusion of collective struggle from the plays is not only a political deficiency. It is, in the end, a limitation on Bleasdale's dramatic vision.

Liverpool - like Glasgow, like Newcastle - is full of Chrissies and Dixies. It is also full of Jimmy Forsyths, Rose Murphys, Dave Kirkbys, Jenny Dales, Tony McQuades, Bobby Owens, men and women thrown. onto the scrapheap who share the world of Chrissie and Dixie but who have kept faith with George Malone.

They are still involved in their collective organisations. They are fighting to turn them to their purposes. They ensure that collective struggle and optimism are still part of Liverpool in 1983.

The Boys From The Blackstuff has done a marvellous job. If it had shown a little more of this, its importance would have been incalculable. Perhaps we should not ask for too much, but rest with the hope that the cycle constitutes a breakthrough for real drama on television.

Nevertheless, when the 1983 People's March reaches London, wouldn't it be wonderful if both Alan Bleasdale and Bernard Hill, who played Yosser Hughes, were on the platform?

----- pull-quotes -----

series, "The Boys from the Blackstuff.

WANTED WORK CARPENTRY