And yet the only time I really feel in command of myself is when I am in that darkened room, because there’s very few things I can do. I’m not very good at the practicalities of life – filling in forms, or changing lightbulbs. I’m not sure I even understand how the wheel works.”If all this sounds a tad grim, he never makes it sound despairing Far from it There’s a robustness about him: he laughs loudly and often. “He’s dramatically very attractive, but you wouldn’t want him in the same room as you. You’d want to catch the early bus home.” And the depiction of the insanity of war in Catch-22 has some influence, he agrees, on the madness of the social security system the men have to put up with in Boys from the Black Stuff – no wonder Yosser takes up headbutting anyone in range, including himself.The Black Stuff, the original one-off on which Boys from the Black Stuff was based, was a huge success when it was first aired, but when he wrote the series the BBC1 controller rejected it for two years running. “I actually think he [Yosser] becomes the better as a man the madder he gets,” Bleasdale says. And that makes sense: Yosser, in his own small way, owes something to King Lear, striding palely across the blasted concrete wilderness with a red gleam in his eye.

” I think if you’re alone in the darkened room, you’re bringing up everything out of yourself, an exorcism of your darkest worries and your darkest fears, but luckily I’ve got an instinct for black comedy: that combination of madness and comedy is what an awful lot of people understand.” Two of the works that he read early on in his life, and that had a shattering impact on him, were King Lear and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, he says. It was probably the biggest heartbreak of my so-called professional life.”Men in torture and anguish? People on the ledge? I suggest that desperation is one of the themes of his work “It does attract me,” Bleasdale says. The debate was perfectly polite, he says: “There were no screaming matches, no fights, no running to the newspapers It was all done with remarkable civility But in the end I said I couldn’t do it And so it never got made. “Boys from the Black Stuff came out in 1981, GBH in 1991, and what I wanted to do was examine, every 10 years, where I thought the pulse of the country was.” It was a six-part drama about people on the ledge of a multi-storey block of flats, “some of them out of desperation, some by accident, one for suicide”.But then ITV asked him to adapt Oliver Twist, and Dickens, he says, was one of the biggest influences on his life: so he agreed, and when he came back to Running Scared there had been more staff changes at the BBC, and he was asked to make some alterations with which he couldn’t agree. He wrote an adaptation of Thackeray’sBarry Lyndon, commissioned by the BBC, but that was scuppered by staff changes at the top and a glut of period-drama scripts. (“I don’t think it’s lost but it’s definitely on the shelf.”) And there was a drama he wrote for the BBC, which was meant to be screened in 2001, called Running Scared. “They can’t get anyone to put up the $65m to make it [because] it’s a period piece.

There’s no bodice-ripping, it’s about men in torture and anguish and difficult situations.” The other script is a television drama for the BBC about the Laconia, a ship that was sunk in the South Atlantic in 1942 carrying more than 2,700 people, most of whom died under attack from torpedoes, bombs and sharks.There are other projects, though, that haven’t seen the light of day and will probably never do so. or I can’t write any more, and I don’t believe that’s true.” It turns out that he’s been working very hard: “I’ve probably worked harder in the last seven years than I’ve ever worked before.”There are two film scripts in the pipeline: one he’s not allowed to describe to me, and the other is an adaptation of Matthew Kneale’sEnglish Passengers, which an Australian production company wants to make. I didn’t want to write about that, I wanted to write about people that you’d never expect to be in the situation they’re in, who’ve done well for themselves and then it all falls apart on them.”So why the seven-year silence? “It’s a difficult issue to explain,” he says, with some thought, “in that for the last few years events occurred that you either think, that’s bad luck or bad planning or, in your darkest hour, that people aren’t accepting the work as readily as they did in the previous 25 years… “Jake’s Progress could have been a kitchen sink drama set on a sink estate.