 For almost 35 years Jim Allen was one of British drama's most persistently
radical voices. His writing never wavered in its commitment to socialism, and he
was a key collaborator of and influence on the likes of Tony Garnett, Ken Loach
and Roland Joffé. More recently, actor Christopher Ecclestone has spoken
admiringly of a man who "wrote beautifully about real people's lives".
Allen was born into a Catholic family in the Miles Platting area of
Manchester in 1926. His father worked on the railways and his mother was a
presser in the clothing trade. Leaving school at 13, he worked in a sheet metal
shop and a fish market, before joining his brother John in the local clothing
trade. In 1944 he joined the army and served with the Seaforth Highlanders.
Finding it hard to readjust to civilian life, he joined the Merchant Navy, where
the extremes of poverty and wealth he witnessed around the world made a great
impression on him. Back in Manchester, he worked on the docks, in the textiles
industry and down the mines.
It was during this period that Allen became involved in the Labour movement,
eventually joining the Socialist Labour League (SLL). While working in the pits,
he helped found and edited the militant newspaper The Miner. Throughout, he
harboured the ambition to become a writer. The opportunity would arrive in the
1960s as broadcasters began to look for authentic working-class voices; none
would be so uncompromising as Allen's.
He began his professional writing career in 1965, contributing scripts to
Coronation Street (ITV, 1960-). The soap helped him to learn his craft, but he
soon became frustrated by its constraints. He would throw some political comment
into his scripts where he could, but increasingly he wanted to write more
fully-formed political dramas. A much-told anecdote has Allen proposing at a
Coronation Street scriptwriters' meeting that the show's principal cast be laid
waste in a freak bus-over-a-cliff incident on a day trip to Blackpool. He left
the soap soon after, but by now the BBC, and in particular producer Tony
Garnett, was interested in producing his more stridently political work.
The first fruit of his collaboration with Garnett, 'The Lump' (The Wednesday
Play, tx. 1/2/1967), told of a young student's politicalisation as a worker on a
building site and drew - like much of his subsequent work - on Allen's own work
experiences. Garnett coupled Allen with director Jack Gold, who employed visual
strategies learnt in factual programmes and documentaries. The integration of
documentary techniques would be a controversial element of Allen's next major
television plays, 'The Big Flame' (The Wednesday Play, tx. 19/2/1969) and 'The
Rank and File' (Play for Today, tx. 19/5/1971). 'The Big Flame' united Allen
with director Ken Loach, beginning the most significant creative partnership in
the writer's career.
Drawing on recent workers' struggles to present an occupation of the
Liverpool docks that intensifies into a near revolution, 'The Big Flame'
unnerved the BBC hierarchy with its potent blend of Loach's increasingly
sophisticated observational documentary techniques and Allen's charged Marxism.
The pair's second collaboration, 'The Rank and File', was Allen's response to a
recent strike at the Pilkington Glass factory in St. Helens. Relocated to
Stoke-on-Trent, the play follows a strike and the workers' subsequent fight
against retaliatory dismissals. While less forceful than 'The Big Flame', it
typifies the writer and director's determination to make politically driven
dramas inspired by contemporary events.
During this period Allen also wrote a number of shorter television dramas,
many of which also drew heavily on his own work and life experiences. These
included 'The Hard Word' (Thirty Minute Theatre, BBC, tx. 12/5/1966), 'The Pub
Fighter' (Half-Hour Story, ITV, tx. 27/2/1968), and 'The Punchy and the Fairy'
(Thirty Minute Theatre, BBC, tx. 10/1/1973). The early 1970s also saw Allen back
at Granada, collaborating with Leslie Woodhead on In the Heel of the Hunt (ITV,
tx. 16/12/1973), another tale of a militant trade unionist.
1975 saw Allen, Loach and Garnett's most ambitious work to date, the
four-part historical drama Days of Hope (BBC). It marked a shift in their work
in its historical setting and its narrative sweep, progressing from the
mid-point of WWI to the 1926 General Strike, which allowed for a re-casting of
history from a working-class perspective. With Days of Hope Allen was explicitly
challenging the nostalgia of much television costume drama and repurposing the
form to uncover the historic betrayal of working-class struggle. The series
became the focus of an intense academic debate about what constituted radical
television drama.
Following Days of Hope, Allen began a spell on Granada's long-running daytime
legal drama Crown Court (ITV, 1972-84). His five stories revealed that he could
work within the formal constraints of a popular format, though stories such 'The
Extremist' (tx. 3-5/12/1975), 'Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil' (tx.
25-26/2/1976) and 'Those in Peril' (tx. 13-15/10/1976) shared a focus on
defendants whose charges arise from political situations.
He returned to the BBC for the studio-bound 'A Choice of Evils' (Play for
Today, tx. 19/4/1977), which explored the Catholic Church's passivity in the
face of Nazism through the prism of Pope Pius XII's refusal to intervene in the
massacre of 335 Italians in Rome in March 1944. 'The Spongers' (tx. 24/1/1978),
the first of two Plays for Today directed by Roland Joffé, was a devastating
story of a mother of a young Down's Syndrome girl hit by social services cuts.
It showed a new concern for community after the industrial focus of much of
Allen's earlier writing. The second Allen-Joffé collaboration, 'United Kingdom'
(tx. 8/12/1981), blended similar community concerns with the
revolution-in-progress approach of 'The Big Flame' in its story of the attempts
of residents of a housing estate to resist rent rises and organise themselves.
In retrospect, 'United Kingdom' can be seen as one of the last hurrahs of the
strain of committed political drama that had thrived, particularly at the BBC,
during the 1960s and 1970s. Ambitious in both scope and length and fiercely
anti-government - though its early drafts were written before the 1979
Conservative election victory - it represented the kind of drama that BBC
managers would find difficult to defend in the face of constrained budgets and
political pressure.
After an entertaining but slight Play for Today about a working-class
philanderer, 'Willie's Last Stand' (tx. 23/2/1982), Allen's final work for
television was the six-part The Gathering Seed (BBC, 1983), starring a young
David Threlfall. It remains one of Allen's least known works and, while it
displays familiar settings and themes, it is sluggish and lacks the power of
Allen's earlier TV work. At the heart of its problems is the unsuccessful
attempt to recreate in the television studio the kind of social realism that
directors such as Loach and Joffé had achieved on film, while director Tom Clegg
was perhaps more at home on popular series such as The Sweeney (ITV, 1974-78)
than on the political family drama Allen had written.
Perhaps in response to the less welcoming environment for radical TV drama,
in 1987 he made a surprise but shortlived move into stage writing. The Royal
Court production of Perdition, which reunited him professionally with Ken Loach
for the first time since Days of Hope, ignited the fiercest controversy of
Allen's career. A deeply researched but nevertheless incendiary drama which
charged Jewish leaders in Nazi-occupied Hungary of abandoning half a million
Jews to their deaths in their pursuit of a Zionist state in Palestine, Perdition
was met by a storm of protest that led the Royal Court to cancel the production
before its first night. Allen went to great lengths to defend himself from
accusations of antisemitism.
The renewed Loach-Allen partnership now switched focus from television to
cinema for the three feature films that would close Allen's career. Hidden
Agenda (1990), Raining Stones (1993) and Land and Freedom (1995) demonstrate
that whether dealing with contemporary or historical events Allen's writing had
lost none of its commitment to socialism. The Belfast-set political thriller
Hidden Agenda proved controversial for its evocations of the Stalker Inquiry
into the police's alleged 'shoot to kill' policy in Northern Ireland. Lighter in
tone, Raining Stones combined politics, humour and drama in its story of a
working-class man whose attempts to make ends meet in the face of economic
hardship eventually threaten all he holds dear. It was a box-office success,
proving that Allen and Loach's work could still be popular with audiences. The
pair's final collaboration, Land and Freedom, follows a Communist Party
member who travels from Liverpool to join the Republican cause in the Spanish
civil war and who subsequently begins to question the Party's Stalinist line.
Here, as in much of Allen's work, he is as concerned to expose the shortcomings
of those supposedly representing the interests of the working class as he is to
attack those opposing them. Land and Freedom stands as a fitting tesimonial to
Allen, and remains one of Loach's best films.
Allen's death in 1999 was no full-stop for political drama on British
television. But few dramas since have burned with the sheer commitment, passion
and uncompromising spirit that marked his best work. As Tony Garnett put it, "He
never wavered in his socialist beliefs or his loyalty to his class." But as well
as an unswerving socialist, Allen was also a highly skilled screenwriter, with a
sharp ear for working-class language and humour and a gift for rendering
stirring rhetoric in natural speech. It is thanks to this combination of
political conviction and practical skill that he left behind some of the most
powerful drama ever produced for British television or film.
Andy Willis
Further Reading
Bennett, Tony et. al. (ed) Popular Television and Film: A reader(London: British Film Institute)
Garnett, Tony (2000) In 'Memories and Appreciations' part of Jim Allen: Lust for Life, a booklet produced for the Jim
Allen Tribute held at Cornerhouse, Manchester in October 2000
Eccleston, Christopher (2011) 'My TV hero: Christopher Eccleston on writer Jim Allen', The Guardian, 24th May 2011
Madden, Paul (1981), 'Jim Allen' in Brandt, George (ed), British Television Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
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