I think the main reason that lots of people round here love the film Kes and the book it came from, A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines, is that it’s about us and it takes us seriously and it doesn’t just use us and the way we speak to get cheap laughs at our expense.
These days there are more works of fiction set in the north in general and Yorkshire in particular but it’s still a fact that, despite the sterling and tireless work of the artistic and cultural community in this borough, much of the work that is produced in this country is still centred around London and the south-east.
One day that’ll change, of course, but maybe not in the immediate future.
What got me thinking about this cultural imbalance was the moment the other day when I found some old scripts for a radio series I co-wrote many years ago about a Barnsley private detective called Steven J Blackburn; me and my mates Dave Sheasby and Martyn Wiley wanted to write something that was very definitely set round here, reflecting the way we speak and the way we think.
The series is often repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra, so you might catch it one day and you’ll be able to work out whether we succeeded or not.
Martyn and Dave aren’t with us any more, so I’m the only one left carrying the Blackburn torch, as it were, but I hope we succeeded at least a little bit in what we tried to do.
We wrote the first series in the late 1980s, not long after the end of the miners’ strike when the area was suffering in the immediate aftermath of forced industrialisation.
Stephen J Blackburn had worked down the pit and had decided, with the aid of a small grant, to set himself up as a private eye. We wrote the character with one particular actor in mind, the brilliant Finetime Fontayne (not his real name) from Wombwell, because he would perfectly understand the way the character of Steven would form his vowels and his consonants without having to be trained by a dialect coach.
As we all know, the subtleties and nuances of the accent are difficult to capture and if an actor gets it wrong, they get it really wrong. For example, if an actor was to say ‘reet’ rather than ‘reyt’, you’d know they weren’t from the Dearne Valley. Reyt?
In the series Steven had an office in one of those light industrial units that seemed to spring up all over South Yorkshire at that time, often built from repurposed pit offices. He had a smart and sharp assistant called Tracey Duggan and he had a mam who wished he’d get a proper job.
As writers we wanted to invent a catchphrase that would last the test of time, one that people might say on the street, and so we peppered each 30-minute episode with Steven saying to Tracey, as she played music at full volume ‘down… else off!’ which mirrored something Martyn’s mother used to say to him when he had his progressive rock albums on too loud.
It never really caught on, although fans of the series will sometimes greet me with a hearty ‘down…’ and then I have to say ‘…else off!’ which is a kind of fame, I guess.
We wrote some of the episodes of the series in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. Dave would sit at a desk with a typewriter. Yes, it was that far back in history; practically the Middle Ages.
Martyn and I would pace up and down chucking gags into the air… ‘he made a lot of money from his hat business – he was a multi-milliner’. ‘Did you pick up any vibes?’ Not with my back…’
Dave would shape them into the plot and the narrative arc of the episode. Martyn would drive him to Wombwell station for his train to Sheffield and we’d all agree that we’d done some good work.
Then, in the evening, he’d ring us and say ‘I’ve read through it, it’s terrible, real rubbish’ and so we’d start again the next day, doing our best to make it funnier, deeper,and more authentic. Just like A Kestrel For A Knave, I guess.
But let’s all keep trying: this borough deserves to be celebrated in writing and art and theatre and music and dance, doesn’t it? Reyt!
