Alan Bleasdale talks about his play On the Ledge

Apr 18 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

SO, WHAT ever happened to Alan Bleasdale? The Liverpool writer whose television series and stage plays were always an event has been strangely absent from both areas in recent years.

His last TV series was in 1999 – a typically abrasive adaptation of Oliver Twist – and he has not written a stage play for 15 years.

It is good to report that Mr Bleasdale is alive and if not totally well (he is infamous for enjoying bad health) is back on the Liverpool theatre scene, as amusing and bullish as ever.

That last stage play On The Ledge was written in 1993 for the National Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse and while it went on at both venues and enjoyed a British tour, it has not been seen since.

Now Bleasdale has revisited his social comedy for a new production at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre from April 25.

It was there we met with a crutch alongside the writer’s chair. When I bring attention to the walking aid, he explains with an impish smile: “I got a kick playing football,” not a bad feat for a man of 62. Then he adds: “Fifteen years ago.”

“It’s come back to get me. It’s the kneecap and will need a spot of surgery.”

The absence from our television screens is easily explained. He has been writing for television, even had commissions, but “the timing has not been brilliant”.

“The number of times I have lost an executive producer or the controller of BBC 1 has gone, goes beyond coincidence.”

When he first came to television, the people were “there forever or at least for a number of years”. Now, he says, it’s all hop, hop, hop.

“That sense of developing and nurturing a writer like Caroline Smith did for me at the Liverpool Playhouse and University Theatre, Manchester and Dave Rose did at BBC Pebble Mill, well, that’s gone.

“On two occasions with two different series, within a month of accepting a commission, the executive producer and controller had gone.

“So that left me knowing I had nine months work ahead of me for someone who did not know me and certainly would not have employed me. They were not easy times.” He kept writing the scripts “because that’s my craft”.

The inevitable happened, and with new faces in place his scripts were not accepted.

“The one that broke my heart was my follow-up to Boys From the Blackstuff and GBH – Boys from the Blackstuff came out in 1981, GBH in 1991 and Running Scared would have been the third part of the trilogy in 2001. It would have summed up our society at the time when people really were running scared.”

He had written six 1½-hour episodes, but the head of drama wanted six 50 minute episodes: “I am 14½ stone, I could get down to my fighting weight of 13½ but she wanted me to get down to 11½. The only way I could do that would be to lose one of my legs and a one-legged boxer never won anything. They wanted to take the guts and heart out of it.”

He was keen to take another commission, a new adaptation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, as he thought Stanley Kubrick’s film version was “dead”. The commission had come from Robert Cooper, with whom he had worked at Liverpool’s Radio City and was then controller of BBC Northern Ireland. “I swear that within weeks of commissioning me and my starting to write, he had left.”