Alan George Bleasdale (born 23 March 1946) is an English screenwriter, best known for social realist drama serials based on the lives of ordinary people.
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.
[8] 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.
[10] 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.
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.
[16] 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 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.
[18] 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).