Alan Bleasdale's touching yet frank drama for Channel 4 about the struggles of a group of young adults leaving school in a deprived area of Liverpool. Starring Stephen Walters, Suzanne Maddock and Amanda Mealing. Based on the acclaimed play by Jim Morris, voted Most Promising Playwright by the Financial Times and Morning Star in 1981. Blood on the Dole shows the lives of four teenagers, two boys and two girls, struggling to cope after being thrust into the real world for the first time after leaving school. Living in deprived Merseyside, the four youths' bright-eyed optimism for their futures and new-found freedom is soon crushed by the realities of unemployment, poverty, and the brutal reality of living and trying to find work in a city in decline. They all soon find themselves in the hopeless situation of facing complete dependence on state handouts, "the dole". The four teenagers instead find themselves turning to each other to find the strength to survive.
GBH was a seven-part British television drama written by Alan Bleasdale shown in the summer of 1991 on Channel 4. The protagonists were Michael Murray, the Militant tendency-supporting Labour leader of a city council in the North of England and Jim Nelson, the headmaster of a school for disturbed children. The series was controversial partly because Murray appeared to be based on Derek Hatton, former Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council — in an interview in the G.B.H. DVD Bleasdale recounts an accidental meeting with Hatton before the series, who indicates that he has caught wind of Bleasdale's intentions but does not mind as long as the actor playing him is "handsome". In normal parlance, the initials "GBH" refer to the criminal charge of grievous bodily harm - however, the actual intent of the letters is that it is supposed to stand for Great British Holiday.
The British governor of a tiny island nation in the Caribbean Commonwealth finds his idyllic existence thrown into chaos when an American drilling company finds a huge source of natural mineral water there.
Of West African and Irish heritage, Mancunian jobbing actor Alan Igbon was a familiar figure on our screens from the 1970s onwards. Most famously, Igbon starred as Meakin in Alan Clarke's 1979 film version of Scum and as Loggo in the seminal drama The Boys From The Blackstuff. Penned by Alan Bleasdale, it was the start of a working relationship that saw Igbon appear in several other productions from the writer, including GBH and Blood on the Dole. Other credits included the rasta Sheldon in the comedy series The Front Line, a student in Alan Bennett's Me! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf and a minder to ex Boys co-star Michael Angelis in the third series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. He also appeared in the soaps Brookside and Coronation Street and the films Babylon and Water. Early in January 2021 it was announced on Twitter by friend and fellow actor Louis Emerick that Igbon has died at some time in December at the age of 68.
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