W
hen the BBC first broadcast Boys from the Blackstuff in October 1982, Mrs Thatcher was rejoicing in her Falklands victory, unemployment had reached 3.3 million and Labour was months from a historic humiliation at the polls.
Alan Bleasdale, the series’s writer, meanwhile, was trekking weekly from Liverpool to Sheffield, where his play It’s a Madhouse was in rehearsal at the Crucible Theatre. He would travel on a Monday, the day after the latest episode aired.
“On that first Monday morning,” he says, “so many people on the train were talking about episode one, and then I got off the train and I got from Manchester to Sheffield and different people, a different class of people, office workers, were talking about it. The next week I
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