Alan Bleasdale

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Presenter0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.

Presenter0:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My Castaway This Week is a playwright. Like a lot of this country's best post-war writers of drama, he comes from the North.

Presenter0:36

In his case it's Liverpool where he still lives and whose characters people his most famous plays. He respects them but he still makes them funny. He loves their city but he's not afraid of showing its warts. And Liverpool which has produced so many entertainers is now, thanks to Boys from the Black Stuff and GBH an entertainment in itself. Their author is Alan Bleasdale.

Presenter0:58

And Liverpool is home, Alan, where you live and work, and which you hate leaving, is that right?

Alan Bleasdale1:02

Yeah, it it's I I don't want to give the impression that I'm running around town flaunting myself. You know, I go to Marks and Spencer's and I go to the theater when there's something worth seeing. But basically Liverpool is a hideaway and the hideaway is our home.

Presenter1:19

Home is where you hide away with all the family noise around you and it's where you do all your work.

Alan Bleasdale1:23

For fifteen years I I worked out of what was the top top attic in in a terraced house, then a a top attic in in a rather nice end of cottage, like three three cottages together. And the house we moved into six or seven years ago, because our eldest boy then was just in his teens, I regrettably, I'm afraid, and foolishly, gave him the attic because I knew that one day he'd want to have a life of his own with us. And I wished to God I hadn't because I ended up in a converted toilet outside the house.

Alan Bleasdale1:55

And it's very noisy. My father, who worked in an oil refinery for all his working life, tends to equate work with noise, and he doesn't feel he's justifying his working capacity if he isn't making a noise. And for his 69th birthday, we asked him what he wanted, and he said he wanted a cement mixer. And well, we got it him.

Alan Bleasdale2:20

Basically what happened was that uh I had to leave our house to go and find a place to work because he then bought about three and a half thousand paving stones and decided that the garden looked attractive when it was paved. And

Alan Bleasdale2:32

I used to be in the downstairs converted toilet trying to write, and my dad's cement mixer'd be outside the window, and every so often he'd shout through the noise, Er, I'm not bothering you, am I, lad?

Alan Bleasdale2:43

So with the greatest of respect and love for my dad, I I thought I'll go and find an office and I I stayed in an office for eighteen months till till all the paving was done and my dad saw the cement mix and I come home. It's it's fine to work there now. I just can't work anywhere else.

Presenter2:59

But now is there any inspiration for you for your writing at all on a on a palm fringed beach, all alone, miles from anywhere?

Alan Bleasdale3:06

Well, strangely enough, for three years from nineteen seventy one to nineteen seventy four, my wife and I were basically running away. Lived in the Gub at Nellis Islands, which is nearer to a palm

Alan Bleasdale3:19

fringe beach that you could ever imagine. I mean, it was the particular island we lived on was eighty yards wide uh and a hundred yards long. We had to play football sideways. I mean it was a very minute like stick in the ocean. So I was preparing for Desert Island Dis twenty years ago.

Presenter3:36

Yeah, but you're going to be all alone on this one, you see. That makes a difference, doesn't it?

Alan Bleasdale3:39

Well, I don't think I could actually survive for very long.

Presenter3:42

What's the first record you're going to put on the Zionist?

Alan Bleasdale3:44

Well, it it's it's Duke Ellington's Take the A Train because when the cement mixer forced me briefly from the house, I took an office in Liverpool, which was a slight mistake because I was above what was described as a models agency, but certainly wasn't. I'm beneath an insurance company, and I really couldn't get much peace there. So I taped all of Duke Ellington's work on 120 minutes of tape, and for eight, nine, ten hours a day, I would just play Duke Ellington all the time. And it took away the curse of the bouncing bodies and the bouncing checks.

Presenter5:19

Duke Ellington and take the A Train. Where does this intense love of family come from, Alan?

Alan Bleasdale5:24

I think from my own family inevitably. Uh it's it's a slightly long story that my my mother was the last of thirteen and my father was the last of ten. And when my mother and father got together you would more or less expect that that I would not be the only child that I am. But my

Alan Bleasdale5:41

My father married my mother on the understanding that she couldn't give me any children because in the late thirties my mother, who like my father, was a keen sports person, was in a cycle race to Southport and she got her bike caught in the tram track and hit a tram and went through the back of the tram and was taken to hospital and and such was the facilities then. What they could gather was that she'd lost the ability to bear children. So my father married my mother on the understanding that she couldn't have any children. And nine months to the day after he came back from the Second World War I was born. And in fact when my mother was, I think, four or five months pregnant, she went to the doctor who defined that that she was not capable of having children, and he told her it was a phantom pregnancy.

Presenter6:29

So you're a miracle.

Alan Bleasdale6:30

Yes, I'm a little miracle, and I presume they tried again, but nothing else ever happened.

Presenter6:33

But you were a very happy threesome.

Alan Bleasdale6:36

Well, immensely close. I'm in a way surprised this took me so long to write about love affairs because I am the produce of of one of the great love affairs. My my mother and father absolutely loved and adored each other almost to to the exclusion of every of everyone else except me. They uh they lived for each other and consequently it was it was tremendously heartbreaking for my father when my mother died quite suddenly.

Presenter7:02

But apparently even as a small child you were much possessed by death. Now what was that all about?

Alan Bleasdale7:06

Well, I think it I'd like to blame the Catholic Church, but it happened at such an age that I don't think I can blame them because they never got hold of me till I was five. I think it was probably my mother suffered as as m as people probably know I do from terminal hypochondria. And the only row I ever ever

Alan Bleasdale7:25

witnessed between my parents was when my father tore the medical section out of the PERS encyclopedia and threw it on the fire because she was working her way through fatal diseases from A to Z. And I'm sure that I've sort of inherited from my mother along with my mother's

Alan Bleasdale7:41

Talents and ability.

Presenter7:42

What we also know about you, of course, even more personal this, is that you volunteered for a vasectomy, and we know that'cause you wrote a play about it. Now that's quite a brave thing for a hypochondriac to do, isn't it?

Alan Bleasdale7:50

That

Alan Bleasdale7:53

Well, it wasn't it was it was just really basically because um we'd had three children in in four years. I just had to look at my wife and she got more than sickness and and she was and still is much younger than me. And I and I thought that it was m morally right that someone like me who didn't expect to live very long anyway should have the vasectomy because w when I'd gone my wife could then find true happiness in someone else's arms and have more children. So that's the reason I did it and I just we got ours done on the rates. Liverpool Council at the time, which was not the council that we've all grown to love and hate over recent years, were given um vasectomies away free to people who paid the rates. So I went to the rates office to get the the examination to have and there and then I knew I had a comedy on my hands.

Presenter8:40

Huff.

Presenter8:41

I think we'd better pause for another record, do. What is it what is it?

Alan Bleasdale8:44

Well, it's it's Guy Mitchell singing. She wears red feathers and it is, because we talk so much about childhood, one of those great pleasures of my childhood because we used every Sunday my uncle George and my auntie Betty used to come to our house and and I saw her realize afterwards they were young, although of course when I was six they seemed ever so old, they were in their twenties. And I know that it was a good place to come because they got a free supper and they liked me mum and dad and they were great company and and my uncle George was a tremendous fan of Guy Mitchell and he used to bring his records and it was it was happy days.

Speaker 19:29

She wears red feathers and a holy hooly skirt.

Alan Bleasdale9:31

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 19:33

She lives on chess cookie nuts and fish for on the sea A rose in her hair, a gleam in her eyes, and love in her heart for me.

Presenter9:45

Guy Mitchell singing She Wears Red Feathers. Were you any good at school, Alan?

Alan Bleasdale9:49

Only on the sports field.

Alan Bleasdale9:51

I was all right till I was eleven. I was the cleverest boy in the school, although I have to say straight away that uh there was five girls who were cleverer than me. But I I was I was bright at at at junior school and then everything fell apart when I went into the grammar school for for various reasons. Possibly I was suddenly mixing with kids whose father had a profession while my dad just had a job. And I and I I I think we all found that a bit difficult to come to terms with. And also uh f further education as from the age of eleven baffled me.

Alan Bleasdale10:24

That was eight sevens of fifty-six. I was so confident, and then they hit me with algebra and geometry, and I just died.

Presenter10:31

But couldn't you write, then?

Alan Bleasdale10:32

I d I wrote uh I wrote two poems, one of which was

Alan Bleasdale10:37

One which started Spring, Spring, the season when everything Springs into life after a season of great strife and the other one was I, I am an outcast hiding, creeping, running from the past.

Alan Bleasdale10:50

And I got ten and six for each of them from the Liverpool Echo, and I immediately thought I was T. S. Eliot. And and I showed them to the science teacher in our school, who immediately chased me around the science lab trying to sexually molest me. So I had a writer's block.

Presenter11:01

So when did you when did you decide you were going to write? When did you actually put pen to paper and think, no, got to stop missing about now, I can actually write something?

Alan Bleasdale11:10

Well one of the

Alan Bleasdale11:11

Major

Alan Bleasdale11:13

Reasons I wrote was that a a girl I was going out with at the time, Diana Matthews, at a college in Warrington, her mother became very ill and she had to go back to to well, she lived in Children County Durham, but she had to go back to look after her mum. And she started sending me these most wonderfully warm and erotic love letters, and it was a great shock to me. I suppose basically I wanted to write back the same letters and responded in kind. And it was the first time I ever felt that I could write. And from there came terrible derivative poetry. But then when I went to teach up back in Hynton, I taught

Alan Bleasdale11:54

basically educationally subnormal children who weren't quite subnormal enough to go to special schools and they didn't have they were fourteen, fifteen, built like two dockers welded together and they didn't really appreciate the the Janet and John books that were available. And that's when I found my own voice, and I found my own voice through the voice of those kids who I taught.

Presenter12:15

That's when you invented the scouse kit scullies.

Alan Bleasdale12:17

Scully was really based on two people, Tommy Culley and Brian Scott. And I put Culley and Scott together and got Scully. And I owe a tremendous amount to to to those kids who I mean, we had a wonderful time, but I mean, it it would never be defined as education.

Presenter12:32

Next record.

Alan Bleasdale12:33

Well, it it goes back to to those times that I've just been talking about when only the the the great beauties of of the world seemed to flourish and there was always, always people in your school you admired tremendously. And f in my school it was Dave Taylor and Susan Monteith, and Dave was like the school hero, and Susan Monteith was the school beauty, and they went out with each other. And the rest of us had to sort of take what was left. And Janice Ian's song at seventeen is really, I think, the truthful.

Alan Bleasdale13:06

Personification of what it's like to be seventeen.

Presenter13:18

I learned the truth at seventeen

Presenter13:22

Their love was meant for beauty queens

Presenter13:27

In high school

Speaker 113:28

Two girls with clear skin smile.

Speaker 113:31

Married young and then retired.

Presenter13:37

Janicean singing at seventeen.

Presenter13:39

So, Scully the Novel was published in 1975, and you were 29.

Alan Bleasdale13:44

Um

Presenter13:46

Why do you love?

Alan Bleasdale13:47

Well, because it the last sixteen years seems to have just

Alan Bleasdale13:50

hurtled over and it's partly having children and partly just the pace at which you live.

Presenter13:55

But it was then, when you wrote that novel, wasn't it, that you decided to to to write full time and to give up teaching.

Alan Bleasdale14:01

Yeah, it was it was i in a way all accidental because it was the ti the the start of of the first quite severe educational cutbacks. And the school I was in wanted me to stay, but they didn't want me to go part time, which is what I really wanted because I was

Alan Bleasdale14:18

Fearful that with my lack of background I could make a career as as a full-time writer. And then I began to get opportunities to write. And I left teaching the day after our third child was born. And my wife was tremendously, ridiculously supportive to me and generous and worked on that principle that there is a tide in the affairs of man. And if I hadn't have left then, I would have regretted it all my life. And if I'd failed, I'd failed, but but but I should try.

Presenter14:48

And a year later you thought up the idea for Boys from the Black Stuff.

Alan Bleasdale14:52

I I've thought up the original idea of the original Black Stuff, never ever believing that it would be the series. It was a one off film. And I was just so grateful to get the opportunity after a year to work on film. And that again was slightly accidental because another more established writer

Alan Bleasdale15:09

uh refused the fee that the B B C were offering. And the the producer, David Rose, to whom I owe a tremendous amount, asked me if I had any ideas for a film. And somebody had just told me a ridiculous story about somebody who worked on the asphalt.

Alan Bleasdale15:23

the day before, and I told him that story. It was about a man butting steak pies to get attention. And I t told him that story, and that man became Yozza, but he never ever got to butt meat pies because that seemed even too absurd. And David bought it on the strength of that, and that's how the black stuff arrived.

Presenter15:42

But it it touched a nerve in the nation, did it I mean, apart from making you a household name and winning you a BAFTA award and all of that, it you you must have got thousands of letters from people because it kind of

Presenter15:51

legitimized unemployment in the sense it stopped people feeling it was their own fault, didn't it?

Alan Bleasdale15:56

Well, I I did write it with that in that for that reason. I wrote it.

Alan Bleasdale16:00

out of a passion and a commitment to what were about to be the disenfranchised in our society. So that was important to me. But I did start writing it in nineteen seventy eight when there was still a Labour government and unemployment was about nine hundred thousand. I mean you only had to walk the streets of Liverpool and read The Guardian to know that unemployment was going to be severe and with the coming of the present government it became even more severe. So that was that was the reason that I wrote it.

Presenter16:30

Shall we have another piece of music?

Alan Bleasdale16:32

Well it it I would inevitably

Alan Bleasdale16:35

Coming from Liverpool and and being of almost the same age as the Beatles, in fact I'm the only person of a similar age to the Beatles in Liverpool who claims never to have met them. And it it is for me in my life which the original version that that was written, which I I've I've sort of seen in books, mentions an awful lot of Liverpool, but they they took it out for probably for commercial reasons. But it's still a wonderfully warm and powerful song.

Speaker 117:02

There are places I remember

Speaker 117:06

Oh my life.

Speaker 117:09

Oh some A cheek.

Speaker 117:11

Forever, not for better

Speaker 117:16

Some have gone and some remain All these places have their moments

Presenter17:21

Ace is half.

Alan Bleasdale17:22

At their moment

Speaker 117:25

Lovers and friends, I still can recall Some are dead and some are living

Presenter17:33

The Beatles and In My Life. You've maintained over the years, Alan Bleasdale, that you're not a political writer and yet every piece that you write seems to arouse some kind of political wrath when you write about

Presenter17:46

Unemployment and the class divide and corrupt councils. How can you say you're not political?

Alan Bleasdale17:50

I certainly wasn't political. I I think I've been politicised to a degree by the present government and politicised to a degree by living in Liverpool. But I don't feel I'm political. I know I wasn't I never voted till I was thirty eight.

Presenter18:04

Didn't you?

Alan Bleasdale18:05

No, I never the big world outside only really occurred to me, I think, w w when I had children, and uh and a a sense that that you would want the world to be a better place to live in. And that was a definite change, see change in me, and then the arrival of the present government, which I think would politicise almost anybody.

Presenter18:16

Mm-hmm.

Presenter18:24

So in that sense you're a political writer, because what you hope as a result of your plays uh is that that things might change or people might have a greater awareness?

Alan Bleasdale18:33

The society might change. I I I I'm massively interested in the society that I sort of belong to, as much as I can belong to any society. One of the problems I have, and maybe one of the reasons for whatever success I've had, is that I'm not tribal. I don't belong. I don't

Alan Bleasdale18:51

Join anything.

Presenter18:52

But if you had to place yourself on the political spectrum, where would you put yourself?

Alan Bleasdale18:57

Um, left of center, but about three or four inches maybe instead of seventy-five miles, which is what a lot of people think.

Presenter19:04

But do you believe let me ask you this do you believe in in conspiracy theories? Do you believe in dirty tricks?

Alan Bleasdale19:10

Of course I believe in them. I believe in them and that I think they make up maybe ten to fifteen percent of the political life of this country, and the rest of it is is the is the cockpit theory of of

Presenter19:22

Yeah.

Alan Bleasdale19:22

of history.

Presenter19:23

But do you believe that the right wing has copyright on those dirty tricks?

Alan Bleasdale19:27

It depends how far left you go. And and my argument is that the further left you go, you become right wing anyway.

Alan Bleasdale19:33

It's an easy argument, but I d I do believe it's true, and it's one of the things I've tried to illustrate in GBH.

Presenter19:38

GBH, as it turned out, was about a right-wing government who who desperately wanted to hold on to power, and so they were putting in the the Argent provocateur. You must have been desperate for John Major not to call a June election. That would have turned the whole thing upside down, wouldn't it?

Alan Bleasdale19:53

Well, it was one of those.

Alan Bleasdale19:56

Whether it's synchronicity or coincidence or

Alan Bleasdale19:59

Uh oh.

Alan Bleasdale20:00

Good timing for has occurred to me all the way through my

Alan Bleasdale20:03

Lack of career and that events occur that I've been writing about that I have no control over. And it was probably, in a way, fortunate for me that instead of there being a general election this June, which everyone was convinced would occur until the problems that this government's had with the economy and various other things, instead of a general election, there was a by-election in Liverpool. I could not possibly have forecast that, but it focused attention on Liverpool. And then I saw a like with the Monaco Mutineer walk into the middle of it. And honestly, Sue, I didn't welcome it. So this controversial aspect of my career is not something I welcome. I in many ways dread it, but I can only write what I can write.

Presenter20:47

Record number five.

Alan Bleasdale20:48

It's Elvis Costello singing indoor fireworks, and Costello is is for me the songwriter of his generation and and this is a particularly splendid example of how gifted he is with lyrics and with melody.

Presenter21:04

And Door fireworks.

Speaker 121:09

Install burn your fingers indoor fireworks

Alan Bleasdale21:17

These wars safe as houses They're not so spectacular They don't burn up in the sky They can dazzle

Presenter21:29

On the light

Presenter21:32

Elvis Costello singing indoor fireworks. We were talking, Alan, about the the slightly unnatural foresight you have uh for events. Does that extend to people too? Do you spot people?

Alan Bleasdale21:45

I think it probably extends more to people than it does to events. I've it's it because I'm preoccupied with people, I've I've no great sense of architecture. I I can respond to natural beauty, but I don't particularly like places very much. And I've always, always been interested in people. And if you think if you're that interested in people.

Speaker 122:00

Yeah.

Alan Bleasdale22:06

you can, for want of a better word, smell them. And and for a long time I've been able to, for example, with with Elvis Costello, whose music we just heard, the very first time he was on television,

Alan Bleasdale22:18

And it was tea time, so my wife was in the back kitchen. I remember shouting into the back kitchen, telling her to come come and see this. And this was a man who I don't think had even had a record contract then. And I just knew that he was somebody with an extraordinary talent. Same with Robert Lindsay, Julie Walters, Neil Koenig, for example. I think Neil Kennock was barely in Parliament, never mind in government. And I heard him and saw him one night, and I remember saying to my wife, This man is very special.

Alan Bleasdale22:50

Um

Presenter22:51

How long ago was that?

Alan Bleasdale22:52

It must be fourteen, fifteen years ago.

Presenter22:54

And are you friends now, you and Nilkinnam?

Alan Bleasdale22:56

No, we've we've we've exchanged letters and and spoken on the phone and nearly met. I would consider it to be an honor to be Neil Koenig's friend, but that would still not necessarily mean that I would I would want to join the Labour Party because I don't think it does Neil Koenig or the Labour Party any good having me on board.

Presenter23:12

Why?

Alan Bleasdale23:12

Well, because i it would then confirm everyone's

Alan Bleasdale23:17

Worst fears that I have a soapbox with me, and I don't really think that I do.

Presenter23:21

But if you're just to the left of centre, you'd suit him quite well, wouldn't you?

Alan Bleasdale23:24

Oh, that's I don't know about that. I think he might surprise us all. I think it might be a cloak he's wearing.

Presenter23:31

What do what do you imply?

Alan Bleasdale23:32

Well, I I think he's a I think he's a radical and passionate man, and and I think that it's vastly important to him and to the Labour Party that they do get the opportunity to have power. And I think that when

Alan Bleasdale23:45

This opposition is in government, it may well be that it is.

Alan Bleasdale23:50

a little bit more radical than some people are are criticising them for.

Speaker 423:54

More music.

Alan Bleasdale23:56

Well, I think it's very appropriate that we that this is uh that this is just rock and roll. It's just a great, great song by Paul Simon, and it's it's music to uh

Alan Bleasdale24:06

The dance term

Alan Bleasdale24:08

Am I?

Presenter24:09

First thing I remember I was lying in my bed Couldn't have been no more than one or two

Presenter24:19

And I remember there was a radio coming from the room next door My mother laughed where some late

Presenter24:29

Well it's late in the evening

Presenter24:32

Our music seeping through Late in the Evening, sung by Paul Simon. How much did you fear, Alan Bleasdale, after the Monocle Mutineer and the Boys from the Black Stuff, that no television company would touch you again, that you were trouble?

Alan Bleasdale24:46

I I I didn't fear it very much. I think my biggest fear was the the way in which television was going and with the the with satellites and with with the the the recent attempts by this government to get money out of the franchises, that people might not be able to afford me. I mean, I come very cheap, but my work doesn't.

Presenter25:04

You're said also to be um um an actor's writer. You you believe, do you, that that that they breathe life into your script. Do they add to it when you're actually recording it?

Alan Bleasdale25:13

Well, some of the best lines I've ever written, I never wrote, you know. Some of the best business. I mean.

Presenter25:16

Many

Alan Bleasdale25:18

In GBH there was very little added at all, but there was some wonderful business. And you would expect that because you're working with talented, gifted people and particularly with regard to GBH who just add dimensions by being there.

Presenter25:30

And both of those main characters, the Robert Lindsay character and the Michael Palin character, Michael Murray and Jim Nelson, they're both.

Presenter25:40

On the edge of madness, aren't they? They're both pushed out again, right onto the edge. Is that is that sometimes where you feel you are?

Alan Bleasdale25:49

Um it's where I fear that I will be where I would where I would go.

Presenter25:54

So why do you fear madness so much?

Alan Bleasdale25:56

I'm sure it's within me. And I d I dread the prospect of of not being aware and in control. The life I've led has been

Alan Bleasdale26:07

Such a wonderful life, not the life that I ever thought I was destined to have, that was ever not expected of me.

Alan Bleasdale26:15

That I value it so much that I don't want it to end and I don't want to lose.

Alan Bleasdale26:21

That sense of life that I have. I've been

Alan Bleasdale26:25

remarkably lucky and well blessed, and I don't want that to go. And it's it is it is inevitably a great fear. But it's not a great fear that I walk around with, it just is there. And it's like the work. M my father used to come home from the the oil refinery, smelling the margarine, and he'd go upstairs and get washed and come down and he wouldn't smell a margarine any more. And he'd never talk about his work and I presume never think about it very much, although his work was inevitably more mundane than mine.

Speaker 126:56

In the m

Alan Bleasdale26:57

But I do have that facility and ability to to to to wash it all away from me. And if I didn't, I would be in serious problem because I I write about people at the very, very edge. But by writing about it, I can actually go upstairs and wash it all off and come back down and not and not have that that that worry about me. And and that's uh I'm that's the side of me that that I get from my father and th and thank God that I do.

Presenter27:25

Record number seven.

Alan Bleasdale27:26

Well, this is Elvis Presley singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? and it's the laughing version. And I think if I'm alone on a desert island, I will need something to laugh at apart from myself. And this I think is outrageously funny, and it's everything that when I wrote about Presley, I wanted to try and capture. And it just shows you the warmth of the man and the wit.

Speaker 427:50

I wonder how much I'm going to do it.

Speaker 427:55

You know someone said

Speaker 427:57

The world's a stage and each must play a part.

Speaker 428:06

Actually,

Speaker 428:13

Oh god.

Speaker 428:14

Oh man, I think

Presenter28:18

Elvis Presley singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? or at least one of the versions of it. Tried to sing it. So, what next, Alan, for you beyond.

Alan Bleasdale28:21

Tried to sing it.

Presenter28:27

The immediate prospect of work. I mean, is there you've talked before now about there being another you out there somewhere, is there?

Alan Bleasdale28:34

Well, I sort of came

Alan Bleasdale28:36

Flying through in the mid seventies along with people like Willie Russell, it was, I have to admit, much easier for us then than it is now, for the simple reason that theatres were falling over backwards to produce our work. And these days, in subsidized theatre and in television and in film, it doesn't happen. It's much, much harder. And I know that there are people out there who must be, must be as good as I was in nineteen seventy five, who need the opportunity. And I think I'm going to be given the opportunity, probably through Channel Four, to give those people the opportunity. So I will spend some time in the next two or three years

Alan Bleasdale29:13

looking for those people and hopefully then producing their work.

Presenter29:17

But in the meantime, here we are sentencing you um to a desert island. How long are you going to last on it? Not long, I suspect.

Alan Bleasdale29:25

I can live on my own, but I can't live on my own without facilities. I mean, I can live without people to a degree. One thing I can't do, and one of the hardest things for me about the last year is that I've spent the last year living out of hotel bedrooms, and the thing that I miss more than anything about about my life at home is being with my family at the end of the day and being with my wife at the end of the night.

Presenter29:53

Last record.

Alan Bleasdale29:55

It's more or less about my wife and my family and and uh my few friends. And it's it's Bob Dylan who if I had any heroes left would still be one. And it's everything I think about the side of my life that not everybody sees and it's sheltered from the storm.

Presenter30:22

Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood.

Presenter30:26

When blackness was a vac

Speaker 430:28

Two the road was full of mud.

Speaker 430:31

I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.

Presenter30:35

Come in, she said, I'll give ya shelter from the storm.

Presenter30:43

Bob Dylan and Shelter from the Storm. So which of the records, Alan, is the favourite of the eight?

Alan Bleasdale30:48

Uh shelter from the storm, Bob Dylan.

Presenter30:51

That's the one you'd play more than any other, is it?

Alan Bleasdale30:51

Um

Alan Bleasdale30:53

Not necessarily, no, but it's it's the one that means the most to me. It's it's it's simply because of from the first time I heard it in nineteen seventy four when it was on the Blood on the Tracks album, it just meant a lot to me. And at that time our family was much younger. In fact, we only had two children and we were

Presenter30:58

Screw it.

Alan Bleasdale31:12

We were struggling terribly and and it was always I always knew that if I got home I'd be all right.

Presenter31:21

And a book on your desert island. You've got the Bible and you've got Shakespeare with you.

Alan Bleasdale31:25

It would have to be uh Joseph Hallard's Catch Twenty Two, which I think is the greatest book of the twentieth century.

Presenter31:31

And a luxury.

Alan Bleasdale31:32

Well, I couldn't find one, you know, it's quite extraordinary. I I was coming home from London a couple of weeks ago and I I met a lad I used to go to school with called Kevin Donovan and I said, I can't think of one and he said, I've always wanted to be asked this question and I said, What would it be? and he said, I'd take nail clippers and I thought

Presenter31:49

Yeah.

Alan Bleasdale31:49

Absolutely right.

Presenter31:51

Why'd you go nail this?

Alan Bleasdale31:52

Well I tell you I tell you well I'll tell you for why, because my nails now grow extraordinarily fast and they grow peculiarly dead. I don't want to be conscious of that. And I also feel that if I am going to make a go of it on this island, I might have to dig and things and I don't want to be like Howard Hughes. So it would be a luxury to me. I think I would really, really enjoy having them there.

Presenter32:14

Alan, please do, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Alan Bleasdale32:18

Thank you, sir.

Presenter32:18

Yeah.

Presenter32:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.