Boys from the Black Stuff

There's a lot of interest in watching tv series on DVD these days. The trouble with this is that people seem to favour watching the next big thing over watching old classic television. Strangely this is the opposite to films, where the explosion of DVD rental has meant that a whole wealth of classic films are suddenly available to a modern audience. So here's a recommendation to you: go and watch some of the classic BBC television series, and start with Boys from the Black Stuff.

Written by Alan Bleasedale - Boys from the Black Stuff is both a gripping drama and a historical document. It tells the stories of the lives of 5 pavement construction workers ('Black Stuff' refers to asphalt) who are made redundant in Thatcher's Britain of the early 1980s and have to survive the dole queues and social upheavals of the day. The first episode is a feature-length one that sets the scene, the 5 other episodes focus on one of the main characters, looking at how they deal with life after their redundancy.

The series is firmly entrenched in a left wing view of events of the time, but rather than beating the drum about politics it focuses on the lives wreaked by economic policies and invites viewers to draw their own conclusions. Only one character in the whole series is an overt Marxist, and his views are derided as coming from ivory towers by the other characters who - despite largely agreeing with him - insist that he's living in a dream world thinking he change anything.

Instead of focussing on the politics, the series holds a microscope up to the mental anguish of being told that you're 'redundant', of being told that your job (and by extension life) has no further purpose. The men from the Blackstuff are forced into taking low-paid moonlighting work while claiming benefits in order to provide for their families. Several sides of this equation are shown; alienation of employees within the benefits agency is just as rife as those standing on the other side of the desk in the dole queue. The lives of entire communities are torn apart as neighbours fear each other as spies and families break apart under the intense stress of making ends meet.

The series isn't just memorable for its story; there are several outstanding performances including Julie Waters and Michael Angelis in one episode that shows how a loving marriage creaks under financial pressures. Perhaps the iconic image of the series is that of Bernhard Hill's Yosser Hughes imploring people to "... gizza job." It's easy to see why the character of Yosser carries so much weight; Yosser's second mantra is a simple "I'm Yosser Hughes", which he repeats to almost everyone he meets and in the episode focussing on him builds to a crescendo as he finally loses his mind. This desperate expression of individual humanity is so saddening, this was the 1980s, an age in which people were supposed to be expressing individuality through materialistic gain - the reality of which was a suppression of humanity through economic squalor.

It is the final episode of Boys from the Black Stuff which haunts me still even as I write this, in which a character is driven to an inevitable death by the state's uncaring attitude to his inability to work. The people around him know that his death approaches, they make his peace with him and help him to see his beloved Liverpool one final time. The character talks about his work on the docks and how strong and proud he was in the past as fought for what he believed - and his death represents a death of that way of life in the modern world. His funeral is a powerful scene, one in which the guiding hand of the catholic church is rejected by people who see not a caring priest, but someone trying to manipulate people in an emotional nadir. The final scenes of the last episode of Boys from the Black Stuff may appear confusing, but I think that they hint at a working class willingly losing its own power through indulgence and resignation to a position of underclass.

Boys from the Black Stuff now seems more important than ever, what with our new lizard overlords promising us an 'age of austerity'. At the moment it's an dramatisation of one of the toughest periods in the recent social history of Britain, it might not be long before we realise that it was also a portent for the future.