It is impossible to underestimate the impact this series had when first broadcast in 1982 - it became a national phenomenon in the UK, and central character Yosser's catchphrase "giss a job" was everywhere. People saw it as a powerful dramatic response to the policies of the then-in-power Thatcher government, even though Alan Bleasdale conceived and wrote his scripts before Thatcher's election in 1979.
A five-part series, Boys tells a selection of the individual stories of former tarmac layers who find themselves hopelessly unemployed in Liverpool. Each episode focuses on a different central character, although all of the main characters appear in most of the episodes. To an extent, the series works a little like a television soap opera, focussing on an individual story whilst keeping the other stories hanging around in the background. The focus, like a soap, is very much on the personal problems of the people we get to meet.
Boys is a kind of sacred cow of British television history, although looked at dispassionately it has some faults. Some of the writing is overly schematic and the dialogue on-the-nose. In the first episode, a left-leaning worker dies in an industrial accident to illustrate how his socialist ideas are also dead; when his also socialist father dies in the final episode, one of the characters says that "George is dead, and what he stood for is dead as well" - come on Bleasdale, did you really think your audience were so thick that they wouldn't comprehend that as subtext without you having to paint it so plain? George Malone, the old socialist who dies in the last episode, is a figure rather too good to be true, which makes the piece unnecessarily propagandistic. No one is that good, that positive, that untouched by the evils of the world (in fact, a lot of old-style socialists were sexist, racist and homophobic bullies).
The portrait of the central characters Yosser, Chrissie and the rest is problematic in that it shows them purely as symptoms of environmental malaise. Now, whilst unemployment can have terrible effects on men, there's something resigned and deeply unintelligent about these men's inability to deal in a creative way with their situation - why are they so bovine, helpless and bereft of fighting spirit? The only character who helps himself is Dixie Dean, reluctantly involved in some petty stealing whilst working as a security guard, for the sake of giving his son some money to escape the area - Dixie's moral qualms are sentimentalised, and disappointingly the son returns in the last episode, as if these people are congenitally incapable of making any sort of life for themselves in the world. Blame Thatcher and society all you like, but these are poor specimens of human beings, and bettering themselves, reading books, learning new skills never enters their minds.
Yosser's story is the most famous, and looked at without sentiment, he's a pretty hopeless case; his story is a failure of the social services, as his children should have been taken from him a lot sooner, and someone with such violent mental health issues should not have been left roaming the streets. Bleasdale goes so far as to suggest it's Yosser's buying into the idea that he, as an individual, should be someone which has undone him, but why is he such a fool as to have pumped his ego full of that nonsense when he clearly has no talents or aptitudes? I find it very hard to sympathise with Yosser, although seeing him being brutalised by the police is unpleasant. The famous "I'm desperate Dan" line is pretty lame, btw.
Perhaps the most appealing character is Jean Boht's social security chief; she has wit and a bit of wisdom, is strong and acts on her desires - in a series where the female characters are mostly either nags or warhorses, she stands out as something a bit special. Notably, her character is very rarely mentioned in critical appraisals of the piece, as the concentration is usually on the "boys" - but the boys are lifeless, hopeless, dreary and uninspiring.
The scene at the end in the pub does conjure up an extraordinary vision of the breakdown of working class communities, with its whistling waiter, ventriloquist dummy and bully asking to "shake hands." Yet finally, these people only seem to have themselves to blame, and Bleasdale tends to sentimentalise them, and the rest of the country ran in a blind rush to follow him. Take your rose-tinted glasses off, and you begin to suspect that these people have little to offer in the first place...
A five-part series, Boys tells a selection of the individual stories of former tarmac layers who find themselves hopelessly unemployed in Liverpool. Each episode focuses on a different central character, although all of the main characters appear in most of the episodes. To an extent, the series works a little like a television soap opera, focussing on an individual story whilst keeping the other stories hanging around in the background. The focus, like a soap, is very much on the personal problems of the people we get to meet.
Boys is a kind of sacred cow of British television history, although looked at dispassionately it has some faults. Some of the writing is overly schematic and the dialogue on-the-nose. In the first episode, a left-leaning worker dies in an industrial accident to illustrate how his socialist ideas are also dead; when his also socialist father dies in the final episode, one of the characters says that "George is dead, and what he stood for is dead as well" - come on Bleasdale, did you really think your audience were so thick that they wouldn't comprehend that as subtext without you having to paint it so plain? George Malone, the old socialist who dies in the last episode, is a figure rather too good to be true, which makes the piece unnecessarily propagandistic. No one is that good, that positive, that untouched by the evils of the world (in fact, a lot of old-style socialists were sexist, racist and homophobic bullies).
The portrait of the central characters Yosser, Chrissie and the rest is problematic in that it shows them purely as symptoms of environmental malaise. Now, whilst unemployment can have terrible effects on men, there's something resigned and deeply unintelligent about these men's inability to deal in a creative way with their situation - why are they so bovine, helpless and bereft of fighting spirit? The only character who helps himself is Dixie Dean, reluctantly involved in some petty stealing whilst working as a security guard, for the sake of giving his son some money to escape the area - Dixie's moral qualms are sentimentalised, and disappointingly the son returns in the last episode, as if these people are congenitally incapable of making any sort of life for themselves in the world. Blame Thatcher and society all you like, but these are poor specimens of human beings, and bettering themselves, reading books, learning new skills never enters their minds.
Yosser's story is the most famous, and looked at without sentiment, he's a pretty hopeless case; his story is a failure of the social services, as his children should have been taken from him a lot sooner, and someone with such violent mental health issues should not have been left roaming the streets. Bleasdale goes so far as to suggest it's Yosser's buying into the idea that he, as an individual, should be someone which has undone him, but why is he such a fool as to have pumped his ego full of that nonsense when he clearly has no talents or aptitudes? I find it very hard to sympathise with Yosser, although seeing him being brutalised by the police is unpleasant. The famous "I'm desperate Dan" line is pretty lame, btw.
Perhaps the most appealing character is Jean Boht's social security chief; she has wit and a bit of wisdom, is strong and acts on her desires - in a series where the female characters are mostly either nags or warhorses, she stands out as something a bit special. Notably, her character is very rarely mentioned in critical appraisals of the piece, as the concentration is usually on the "boys" - but the boys are lifeless, hopeless, dreary and uninspiring.
The scene at the end in the pub does conjure up an extraordinary vision of the breakdown of working class communities, with its whistling waiter, ventriloquist dummy and bully asking to "shake hands." Yet finally, these people only seem to have themselves to blame, and Bleasdale tends to sentimentalise them, and the rest of the country ran in a blind rush to follow him. Take your rose-tinted glasses off, and you begin to suspect that these people have little to offer in the first place...