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Scully

ALAN BLEASDALE etched these BLACKSTUFF-lite tales of the eponymous Scouse kid (ANDREW SCHOFIELD) kicking in phone boxes and failing a trial for Liverpool FC. Began life as stories told by then-English teacher Bleasdale to his pupils.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Glenn Aylett

    June 30, 2020 at 6:14 pm

    Liverpool stereotype then, did he live on a council estate and sign on when he left school, while dreaming of playing for Liverpool, even though nearly as many people in the city follow Everton? From Rocky O Rourke to One Summer, the Liverpool teenage male was always portrayed as living on a council estate with no prospects and finding a release through football and petty crime.

    • Tom Ronson

      October 27, 2022 at 4:49 am

      My older brother used to sit there laughing his head off at this back in the summer of 1984. It’s been a dull enough evening for me to plough through the entire series on YouTube, and it really feels as if the final fifty-minute episode should have been a single standalone drama rather than the last of seven episodes. The actor playing Scully was a twenty-five-year-old man playing a sixteen-year-old schoolboy, yet he looks even older, making this one of the oddest depictions of school life outside of the Please Sir! film. Liverpool stereotypes left, right and centre – shit home life, best mate’s as thick as a brick (Catchphrase – ‘Yeeees!’), mum’s on the game, dad’s a feckless layabout drunk, everyone he knows is involved in petty crime to some degree, supports Liverpool FC, idolises Kenny Dalgleish (who is seen tooling around in an Audi Quattro in one scene – sorry, Ken, but that’s a bold look and you really need to be a Gene Hunt to pull it off)… you get the picture. There’s even the archetypal horrible eighties copper complete with Hitler hairstyle, and some pretty ropey fantasy sequences involving a school caretaker nicknamed Dracula, for some reason. Elvis Costello appears in a couple of episodes as Scully’s mentally handicapped, train-fixated brother.

      Alwyn W. Turner has written in considerable detail on his Trash Fiction website about the flaws in Bleasdale’s writing, and they’re just as glaring here as they are in Boys from the Blackstuff – in short, he complains that television is a pretty crap medium where everything has to be boiled down to the lowest common denominator and filtered through personal experience, when we should be looking at the broader socio-political reasons behind terrible things being allowed to happen.

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