Bleasdale's first successes came as the writer of radio dramas for the
BBC; several of these plays followed the character of
Scully, a young man from Liverpool, and were broadcast on
BBC Radio Merseyside. Between 1974 and 1979, the character of Scully continued on
Radio City Liverpool through a series titled the
Franny Scully Show. The character became so successful that Bleasdale wrote a stage play, two novels, and in 1978, a
Play for Today titled ''Scully's New Year's Eve
. Filmed in 1978 and screened in 1980, the play focused on the issue of unemployment and despair felt by working class British citizens. Prior to screening, Bleasdale wrote to David Rose, head of BBC English Regions Drama, and Michael Wearing, script supervisor, and pitched the idea of a five-part series of plays that further explored the characters from The Black Stuff
. The result was the BAFTA winning series Boys from the Blackstuff'', which was transmitted on
BBC2 in 1982.
Bernard Hill starred in the role of
Yosser Hughes, whose catch-phrase "Gizza job" became synonymous with the mass unemployment of the
Thatcher years. The series established Bleasdale as one of Britain's leading television writers and social commentators. After
The Black Stuff but before
Boys from the Blackstuff, Bleasdale wrote
The Muscle Market, which aired as a
Play for Today on TV in 1981 and starred
Pete Postlethwaite and
Alison Steadman. Unlike
Blackstuff, this play looked at the road construction industry from the boss' side rather than the workers. Bleasdale wrote the screenplay for his only feature film
No Surrender (1985), a black comedy which examines the animosity between the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland. Set in a seedy Liverpool night club, the film focuses on a group of elderly Protestant hardliners attending a New Year's Eve party on the same evening as a group of Catholic retirees. Bleasdale adapted William Allison and
John Fairley's 1978 book
The Monocled Mutineer into a four part miniseries in 1986. The series, starring
Paul McGann, dramatises the WWI
Etaples Mutiny of 1917. In 1987,
Charlottetown Festival director
Walter Learning presented the
Canadian premiere of the Bleasdale musical
Are You Lonesome Tonight? at the
Confederation Centre of the Arts, a national arts centre located on
Prince Edward Island. The musical, which took a tough look at the life of
Elvis Presley, attracted controversy at a festival for its coarse language and adult subject matter. Regardless of the objections, brought up in the provincial legislature, the play was a success for the festival. Bleasdale penned the political drama
G.B.H. (Great British Holiday) for
Channel 4 in 1991. Focussing on the political upheaval of the
Labour Party in Liverpool,
G.B.H. pits mild-mannered protagonist Jim Nelson against the northern City Council leader Michael Murray. In 1994, Bleasdale collaborated with Keith Thompson and David Jones on an anthology of four filmed dramas written by authors who had no prior screenwriting credits. The scripts were chosen from a pool of 2,000 applicants, with Bleasdale acting as producer/mentor to each of the four writers chosen and then working on the projects from start to finish. The films, Andrew Cullen's
Self Catering, Raymond Murtagh's
Requiem Apache,
Jim Morris'
Blood On the Dole, and Christopher Hood's
Pleasure, were screened over four consecutive weeks in October of that year. Bleasdale continued his work for Channel 4 with 1995's serial ''Jake's Progress'', the story of a modern-day dysfunctional family (
Robert Lindsay as the father and
Julie Walters as the mother) struggling to cope with a "difficult" child (Barclay Wright). In 1999, Bleasdale adapted
Charles Dickens'
Oliver Twist into
a four part miniseries for
ITV. After an eleven-year absence from television, Bleasdale returned in January 2011 on BBC Two with a two-part TV film,
The Sinking of the Laconia. He had been working on the screenplay since 2004; it depicted the events surrounding the World War II ocean liner
RMS Laconia and the
Laconia incident. ==Personal life==