“The series of five plays that became Boys from the Blackstuff is much more overtly about the unemployment situation than the original single drama,” says Cooke.
The subsequent 1982 series, Boys from the Blackstuff, depicted the effect of unemployment on the same characters just as the number of those without work in the UK topped three million.
The hectoring catchphrase of Yosser Hughes, the character played by Bernard Hill in Alan Bleasdale’s classic BBC drama Boys from the Blackstuff, passed almost overnight into the language under the first Thatcher government.
With some direr estimates predicting that post-Covid unemployment could touch four million, it seems an appropriate time to reappraise Bleasdale’s bleak but also very funny masterpiece.