Interview with Alan Bleasdale

By Adam Ford

Alan Bleasdale is one of Liverpool’s most famous writers – a man with a great talent for creating memorable characters and giving voice to working class characters with problems almost everyone can relate to. Nerve got in touch with him and discussed his career, his politics and his current projects.

You’ve recently done some work for Sahir House - a local AIDS charity. Why do you think the AIDS issue is particularly important?
B: Well, in the 21st century, I think there are two reasons. One of them is the rise or role of fundamentalism, of all colours, creeds and characteristics -whether it be Islamic fundamentalism or the Christian fundamentalism either in Downing Street, or cowboy fundamentalism in the White House. And I think that is something that is quite plainly terrifying - it should terrify anybody with a sense of history of the world. And the other major, serious threat that the world faces - I mean, it could be global warming - but, the one that I feel most concern for is the threat of HIV and AIDS - throughout the world - and I think it’s something that is swept under the carpet and it shouldn’t be. You only have to be presented with the statistics - that indicate its spread, in all people - of all classes, castes, sexuality, and creed throughout the world. And the increase here - for example in Liverpool and Merseyside over the last twelve months - means that people have either forgotten, closed their eyes - or are shielding their eyes... and, to cut a long story short, both Willy and I, have been part of Sahir House’s work, for some time - quietly. And in the end - I think this time last year - I said to Willy: “C’mon, we should do a show together and see if we can raise money, and public consciousness to the fact that HIV, AIDS etc is still a major problem.”

A: Do you think there is a particular reason why awareness of HIV and AIDS has fallen since the 1980s?
B: I think people get used to things y’know, it just becomes part of public health for some reason, and then a whole list of other things come on top of it. I also think basically it’s, in our sexual nature that however liberated and free we all pretend to be in the modern age I think people are still very nervous about their sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases. For example we’ll know something, but will not exactly sit down in a wine bar and talk about it at great length. You’re more likely to talk about the rise of fundamentalism, or global warming - if you read the Guardian that is. Although I don’t think any of those three are on a list of things to talk about in a wine bar. But I think people are scared of it - if you’re scared of it you’ve got to face it, and people aren’t facing it.

A: How did you get your big break in writing? And how do you stay motivated? Our readers are interested in writing, so they’d be interested to know how you got your motivation in [your] writing...
B: Well I had extraordinary good fortune - and - I think you do need to. I think most people do have a reasonable chance of being discovered if they have the talent. That is unless you really do hide your work in a garage, and just don’t show anyone. It was thirty years ago, I’d written about ten or eleven short stories, I was still teaching -I was in a school in Huyton, called St. Columbus’ Secondary Modern. Well it was New Year and I was about to leave with my wife, for the Gilbert and Ellis Isles in the Western Pacific for an interview and I had these twelve stories and – well ten or eleven...short stories, which, I didn’t quite know what to do with, um...and so, in my foolishness - and perhaps my innocence - I turned up at BBC Radio Merseyside, at 7 o’clock - in the evening - on New Year’s Eve and presented these short stories - for which I had no copies - to the girl on the reception desk, and said “Well I’ve got these short stories, I don’t know what to do with them; maybe someone at the station would like to read them”. Now, I now know enough about radio and television to know that it was a distinct possibility that they could have all ended up in the bin and all the people in reception could have gone off and partied the New Year. She put them in a big pile of other people’s stuff who’d obviously turned up with their short stories!
A couple of months later - and here’s where by extraordinary good luck, y’know they didn’t end up in the bin. And then I had the extraordinary good luck that a bloke called Victor Marmion, who was then running Radio Merseyside asked a young Assistant Station Manager called Tony Smith…he told Tony Smith that he wanted to do a project with him, a half-hour series of short stories by local, unpublished, Liverpool writers. Tony was a really nice bloke: very young, energetic and eager, and ambitious. He read them all, rang me, no actually, by that time I was on a course in Farnborough to teach English as a Second Language. And he rang my mum and dad up - that was the address I’d given - and he said he really liked the stories and could I come in and record them - he couldn’t afford any actors- one Sunday morning! So my mum - who always believed that I would be the best - either me or Graham Greene in writing, rang me in a hysterical state of excitement, and then I rang Tony Smith ...and Tony says, well...”you haven’t got any money”. “Well”, I said, “I’m in Farnborough”! So he says I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll pay for the hire of a car for a weekend, and your petrol, if you’ll come up and do it. And I still vividly have it stored in my brain that it was £13.25 for the hire of an Austin Mini and the petrol that went with it. And I went up, recorded all these short stories and then drove the 240 miles back to Farnborough. And two of those stories were about a 15-yr-old Liverpool tearaway called Franny Scully, who I’d modelled on some of the kids that I was teaching at the time in Huyton. They went out on the radio. By this time, I was about to go to the Gilbert and Ellis Isles to teach English. It went out on Radio Merseyside one Sunday afternoon - it thrilled my mum and dad to bits - but what happened then was a bloke called Jim Walker who was working for World in Action and a woman called Barbara MacDonald who worked for the BBC’s Start the Week - were in Liverpool and Jim Walker’s driving back to Manchester. He’d had Radio Merseyside on his car radio - heard one of these short stories - which was Scully’s story, thought it was absolutely wonderful –and - here’s what generosity of spirits is - and this is so important for writers who are starting now, that you need someone who has generosity of spirit. He rang Radio Merseyside - of his own free will - when he got home, and said I’ve just heard this story by a bloke called Alan Bleasdale - I think its absolutely wonderful will you tell him to keep going! - and left his name and his phone number. And then - Barbara MacDonald who was with him got hold of two of the stories that she liked and she put them on Start the Week on BBC Radio 4.
Now, it didn’t exactly set me up for a Nobel Prize in literature, but what it made me do, Adam, - it made me realise that somebody out there, who knew what they were doing.. liked the work and that gave me the confidence, when I went to the Gilbert and Ellis Islands, to start to write a novel which was about this tearaway from Liverpool called Scully. Where I was teaching was right on the Equator so it was unbearably hot, and a very small island; the only things that grew there was the mounds of bird shit and Coconuts n’ that. We finished school at a quarter to one in the afternoon, so I’d sit under a mosquito net, and write for three or four hours. And then I sent this off to an agent - whom I’d found basically in the Artists and Writers Yearbook for 1970 - and he liked the work. But it was rejected by, I think, fifteen or sixteen publishers before Hutchinson accepted it. But what I had done - because I still didn’t have a great deal of faith in myself at the time - was, I wrote the first 150 pages and thought, well I’m wasting my time here - and in the letter I’d wrote to the agents (A.M. Heath), I said I can't afford to send the whole book, it costs so much for the airmail -but I do have the remaining 150 pages here - and thought no more about it, but...one plane came a week - Saturday, to the island and... came with the letter saying Hutchison had accepted the book – “Please send the remaining 150 pages”. So, in one week, between the planes coming and going, I had to write the next 150 pages - then it was published. And then I got a half-hour television play. Then a woman who was at the Liverpool Playhouse - called Caroline Smith –again sat at home in Old Swan listening to Radio Merseyside -heard a short radio play I’d done and commissioned it for a full length stage play at the Liverpool playhouse... all these things in trying to frame; it’s a long story, but the heart of it all is: You DO Require extraordinary good luck, and you need the kindness of strangers. They’re two things I think you need, apart from a degree of talent. You’ve - I think - heard the quote, its Anthony Burgess, that writing is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration, and the perspiration is as important as the inspiration.

A: OK, What techniques do you think are especially important for writers starting today?
B: CHARACTER AND STORY; you’ve got to have good characters and you’ve got to have a really good story, I mean that’s something that’s been with us since...Shakespeare! - If you haven’t got them then you’re in trouble. But I think the thing as well is - you know, you have to be merciless in your questioning of yourself and your story – don’t just sit there and think, ‘well this is good’. You need to walk away from it for a while and then come back to it: and then you will find out what’s wrong with it, because you add that distance to it. It’s just application of whatever talents you’ve, got you’ve just got to work at it.

A: You mentioned characters, and you’ve created some very memorable ones... how do you get into that process of developing characters?
B: Well, to my concern for my mental and physical health, I am a binge writer, when I’m working, and I work definitely long hours. I’d take long breaks between work to think about it, make notes; there are bits of paper all over the desk. And then I basically sit there, 11 o’clock in the morning to 4 o’clock the next morning, day and night, for as long as I can which isn’t particularly healthy! But it’s the way I’d tend and just try to become the people I’m writing about. At the moment I’m writing an adaptation of William M. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, and the first part of the book is set in Ireland... And to my great shame I can be found up - at 2 o’clock - around the house, speaking in the dialogue with a person I actually have never heard.

A: What do you think it is about Liverpool that helped it produce so many good writers?
B: I think it’s the influence of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Dock economy, and the fact that nobody had proper jobs up to about a hundred years ago. My mother’s family is from the Dingle and my Dad’s family is from Scotland Road - that’s where they were born and brought up. I’d…a lot of my mother’s family especially were dockers, and when I was a kid, you’d go down to the Dingle and you’d hear stories of these six thousand men in a pen, with 300 jobs, of a 6 o’clock on a Monday morning. And the 5700 men, who went back up the hill - and they’d go into the pub... and play cards, and they’d have the crack. And that was generally, in Liverpool, that there wasn’t constant labour - like, say with the industrial revolution, like Manchester or Birmingham and so there was an awful lot more time for people to talk. To create stories, and to…I think Liverpool is very much a verbal city, and surely it comes from the, y’know, the Welsh and the Irish, and it comes from the fact that not many people had jobs a long time ago.

A: About the Capital of Culture: How do you think Liverpool’s Capital of Culture status is going to affect the City?
B: Well I just hope it isn’t just proud wallpaper to cover the cracks. I think the acid test for me is this: I have occasionally a serious ear infection, and so I go down to the Royal hospital, say, three times a week - Monday, Wednesday, Friday - get up first thing in the morning to get my ears sorted, and I have to go through Kensington - which is where I used to live, in the seventies with my wife and children - and in Kensington - you’d find this in a lot of other places around Liverpool - it has declined. As much as there are the bright lights and luxury apartments, and the wine bars, in the centre of Liverpool, there is also a decline, in places like Bootle, Old Swan and Kensington and areas outside of the city. What I’m trying to say is, I would hope that - in the year 2008 - if I’m still going to the bloody hospital, that Kensington will look a damn sight better than it does now because its…by culture you’d still mean poets, and artists, and musicians, and actors, and singers, these are cultural - it should be for the cultural benefit of everyone in this city. And culture includes your culture - how you live. And it will have failed if there’s still areas in Liverpool that have just have got worse. And I know when I went to Glasgow after the city of culture you could see the amazing affect it had on so many parts of the city, I think it as a great success. I think the people who are organising this have to be aware it’s for all the people of Liverpool.

A: How much do you think Liverpool’s changed since the work for which you’re best known – Boys From The Blackstuff?
B: I think in many ways it has changed for the better just on the pure level of employment, although jobs working for McDonalds may not be defined as employment as far as I’m concerned. Though you do worry that were not going to go down like the Titanic, and I think an awful lot of it is there is a wealth in the city that wasn’t here before, and quite frankly you have to question were some of that wealth is coming from.

A: What do you mean?
B: Well I think there’s a culture that isn’t exactly on the side of the law in this city, I think some people have become considerably wealthy on matters of substances that may be defined as illegal. But it’s still a city I want to live in, I don’t know when I retire if I’d like to live in North Wales or Cornwall, when I get older. I still love living here – it’s like an old overcoat, when you go out the house and down the drive, and you go down the road you know where you are, and you know where your safe and where to go and apart from three years in Gilbert and Ellis Islands and three years when I was doing my teacher training this is the only place I’ve ever lived, so 51 out of 57 I’ve been here.

A: Finally, can you tell us about the adaptation you mentioned earlier?
Well it’s a commission from the BBC to adapt William Makepeace Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon which was a film in the seventies directed by Stanley Kubrick - I’m a great fan of Kubrick - but this was something he absolutely ballsed-up. If you’ve seen the film you would want to hang every frame on the wall in your house, its absolutely staggeringly beautiful, but the concept is just drivel; he turned Barry Lyndon into Long John Silver, I’m surprised he didn’t end up with a bloody wooden leg. So its an annoying film, concept wise it was drivel and the BBC have asked me to add something that is more than a passing glance of the book, and it does fascinate me, because it is about morality and values and Barry Lyndon doesn’t have any morality and values and that is something that is relevant to the society we live in now. A lot of people don’t even understand what values and morality are. I’ve just finished an adaptation of a wonderful book called English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, which won the Whitbread prize in 2001 and that’s a feature film I’ve been commissioned to write and I’m really happy with it although the book is nearly six hundred pages long and I’ve had to bring it down to one hundred and fifty. I became the mad butcher of Mossley Hill murdering characters left right and centre, in fact one of the characters that runs all the way through the book gets murdered on page five, though I think I’ve kept the heart, the terror and the philosophy of the book, the only problem is you need $60 to 80 million to make that movie and it is set in the 19th century and a lot of it involves the quest of a aboriginal boy. I’m not sure if Miramax or Hollywood are going to be jumping up and down at that prospect. But I did it because I wanted to do it and that’s another message I’d like to convey to writers trying to make it: Do it because you want to do it, don’t do it because you have a chance of three episodes of Brookside or something.