I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  Maybe Trevor did that often, went out and found something soothing in this vast horse. I just happened to be there to witness it that one time. I felt what that experience gave me was an affirmation that what had happened between me and Trevor was positive. That was important to me. I had found it hard to reconcile that our friendship had arisen out of the death of his two daughters, just the same as Derek Bentley’s scaffold had been the launchpad for my career. I’m being a little melodramatic there, but it’s only natural to make that connection. It had taken other people’s deep distress to place me on film representing them or their family.

  When it came to the demand for truth, the drama only made a small contribution, but it was, nevertheless, a contribution. After it was broadcast, there were questions asked in the House of Commons. If nothing else, the anger of the families felt expressed, reinforced further by the disgust of millions that they, and therefore the memories of their loved ones, should have been cast aside by those in authority in such a hideously insulting and grotesquely insensitive way. As so often, names had been besmirched, lives dismissed, to protect those in power. The truth is now out. As tends to be the case with high-level scandals, it has taken thirty years to do so. In that time, evidence is lost, memories become hazy, key figures die, and mass outcry is distilled. The self-protectionism of the powerbrokers is clinical in its cynicism. The emergence of the truth has appeased the pain a little, but it still exists in stark measure. Thousands of ordinary people live the torture of Hillsborough every day, and that emotional tautness continues to cascade down through the generations.

  I have a photograph on my fridge of me trying to turn myself into Trevor Hicks. I took it on the way to meet him that first time. But I could never turn myself into Trevor Hicks. Only he knows what it is to be him, just as only the other relatives know what it is to be themselves. All we can do is pay them the respect of remembering, and of seeking to understand.

  Hillsborough is the performance that gives me most personal fulfilment. I wanted to be in dramas that prompted questions to be asked in high places, that caused embarrassment for the country’s all-powerful elites, the same as had happened in the wake of Cathy Come Home, Boys from the Blackstuff and The Spongers, my favourite drama of all time, a classic Play For Today, written by Jim Allen and directed by Roland Joffé, set against the backdrop of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, which follows a young mother’s spiral as she and her children are battered into an early grave by welfare cuts. Right from the start I wanted to be in dramas like that – dramas that matter. That’s what I wanted to do then and that’s still what I want to do now.

  Roles such as Trevor Hicks have given a drive to my career. I have never felt that acting is a proper job. My mum, dad and my brothers grafted manually and so I went into acting with the attitude that it was a little bit indulgent. There was a sense of guilt that I had got to do things they hadn’t. I felt a certain amount of embarrassment, shame and unmanliness about becoming an actor, and the antidote to that, for me, was to do work that I thought was valuable. I was determined that my output should in some way matter. So, of course, I felt a duty to do things like Hearts and Minds, which highlighted the abandonment of the working class in the education system, and feel filthy when I did things like Gone in 60 Seconds, which highlighted the abandonment of my principles. On a selfish basis, Hillsborough, and other similar projects, made me feel better about doing what I thought, in what I now know to be my ignorance and innocence, wasn’t a real man’s job.

  At the same time, right from when I can remember, I was massively impacted upon by television as viewed by my mum and dad. When it came to TV, they were nothing if not consistent. The set was only on if there was something worth watching and that meant good drama, sport, news and documentaries. Television in our house was there to entertain, inform and challenge. It wasn’t there to be moving wallpaper. Definitely no soaps. My mum and dad were violently opposed to watching soaps. Coronation Street in particular was loathed. We were from Salford and so we had two constant problems with those who made Coronation Street. One: were they laughing at us? And two: if they thought Coronation Street was representative of our lives, they didn’t know what they were talking about. People still have an idea that soap operas – Emmerdale, EastEnders, all that bollocks – give working-class people a voice. They don’t. They’re just fantasy horseshit. Pointless. Irrelevant. Mum and Dad embraced the Dennis Potter view, that television is a way the working classes can better themselves. Potter described it as ‘their window on the world’. Reflecting its sausage-machine output, he also called it the ‘idiot lantern’. Mum and Dad never watched it as the latter. They were both autodidacts, always wanting to use every part of their mind, and that influenced me hugely. I knew in particular the power of TV for people who didn’t have season tickets for the laughably titled National Theatre or enough money to go to the pictures. Potter knew it too. He believed in television as an absolute instrument for education and enlightenment. That’s how it had come into our home and how I had observed my mum and dad watching it. The Spongers, for instance, had destroyed my mum, just as the increasing numbers of dramas featuring homosexuality had challenged my dad. For Dad – as perhaps it was for homosexuals when finally they saw themselves represented realistically on TV after years of being little more than sitcom stereotypes – television, done properly, delivered a metaphor for real life. For a man who I never heard use the phrase ‘working class’, television was definitely an expression of his sense that he was born into an unequal society, expressed obliquely in ways such as siding with the native Americans in a western. Dad was a man who enjoyed seeing an abuse of power turned around. Every week, for example, we’d watch Branded, a black-and-white American series about an army officer wrongly court-martialled for cowardice, and his fight for justice. It was basic good versus bad, right versus wrong. I learned so much about him from those precious times in front of the TV and developed a similar love of drama with a socially relevant edge.

  As well as The Spongers, which I watched when I was thirteen, the drama that really pierced me as a kid was Kes, Ken Loach’s telling of Barry Hines’s amazing story of a young boy with a wonderful gift, an intuitive relationship with a kestrel, a relationship doomed, as is his own life, to the dustbin. It’s Loach’s greatest film, where his politics and poetry mix perfectly. I saw it first at the pictures, Unit 4 in Walkden, when I was about eight. I saw it again not long after on BBC Two, back when it used to show great films. It struck me how the light in the film was just the same as on my estate. I came later to understand that was because they were shooting with available light, like a documentary. But to me it was revelatory. That light, same as above those council houses in Little Hulton, was something I never countenanced seeing at the cinema. Same with the everyday dynamics of a working-class upbringing, the mocking, the casual violence, the cruelty in the showers after a game of football – I’d never seen any of it captured on screen. Kes changed my entire idea of what film was, as did Blackstuff and The Spongers with television. Drama, made for a mass audience, could actually have a realist element. It was then I saw what acting could be. And it was precisely those experiences that led me, on my first major acting job, to draw a line on Let Him Have It, to stand up and say, ‘No, Derek’s not like that.’

  Television and film have power. Given the opportunity, it would be remiss not to use it. Hillsborough represented a miscarriage of justice and so did Let Him Have It. Both those dramas were in effect part of the process of righting a vast and deep-seated wrong. It took another twenty years for an inquest jury to find those ninety-six Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed. Everything that was said in Jimmy McGovern’s drama was proven to be true. In 1998, five years after Let Him Have It, and forty-five years after his trial, the Court of Appeal quashed Derek Bentley’s conviction for murder. Sadly, his sister Iris never lived to see the day. She died of cancer the year before.

  So it feels entirely natural for me to pursue political and so
cietal topics in television. I will always seek them out. It’s impossible for me to do otherwise. I appreciate drama when it speaks truth, so of course I’m going to be a pain-in-the-arse social campaigner. Of course I am.

  To this day, I think the job of film, theatre and TV is to give a voice to those who have none.

  Hopefully that voice is present in at least some of the work I have done.

  18

  MY FRIENDS IN THE NORTH

  My mum looked at me. ‘You know you keep getting all these funny parts? It’s not because of us, is it?’

  I was experiencing a rush of instinct. Lying in my bedsit, I was perusing the script, laid out on blue paper, for Cracker. Three pages into episode one was a line – ‘I rehearsed the death of my father for years.’

  I had one thought: I’m in.

  Cracker marked the beginning of my relationship with Jimmy McGovern, the writer I’ve worked with more than any other. The line wasn’t particularly significant in the big scheme of the drama, but something told me it came right from Jimmy’s life. And it came right from mine. I’d done the same right from being a little boy, preparing myself for my mum and dad’s death. My mum told me I was always asking her, ‘When will you die?’ My kids do the same now, a natural curiosity. The difference is I asked a bit too much. I said to her straight once, ‘What was I like as a child? Was I troubled?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you were a happy child, but you did ask me when I was going to die and what would happen a lot.’

  ‘Did the twins do that?’

  ‘No.’

  I would still be doing it nearly twenty years on from Cracker when I had my breakdown. Sat on Mum’s stairs, I started babbling to her that all my life I’d been scared of her dying.

  ‘I know, Chris,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been like that.’

  Anxiety. Not curiosity. So when I saw Jimmy’s line, I thought straight away, I’ve got to work with this writer.

  That was a decision made on pure emotion. In all honesty, the role itself, DCI Bilborough, I never really rated. I knew, however, that this was a series that was going to say something. Play for Today and its ilk had long gone by the mid-’9os. TV had changed, and social reality was deemed dull, dry and unstarry. The only way Jimmy, and others like him, could write about deep social issues and get them on TV was by creating a Trojan Horse. In Jimmy’s case, he gave ITV what they wanted, a cop show, and slipped in the social issues around it. Jimmy was forever one step ahead of the game. There would have been no drama about Hillsborough without Cracker. With Robert Carlyle’s traumatised antiauthoritarian killer, Jimmy broached the subject first right there.

  Cracker was a classic of its form. As much as I knew the show would be dominated by Robbie Coltrane as Fitz, an incredible part, and as much as I didn’t wish to play second fiddle (I wanted the part of Fitz and I told Jimmy as much), I wanted to be part of something that had a voice shouting far, far louder than another formulaic detective drama. Cracker? That’s not like any police procedural I’ve ever seen, and Jimmy had no intention of it ever being that way. The first thing he ever said to me was, ‘I really liked that thing you did about the skinhead.’ He was referring to a twenty-minute short called Business with Friends in which I played a Nazi skinhead. He was sending me a message. I was playing a TV cop, but he wanted me to know this wasn’t Midsomer Murders – ‘Whatever you were doing there, Chris, I want that.’ The fact he’d seen this very obscure piece of work of mine was very important. It told him a lot about me, and it told me that he was a man who wanted very much more than bland surface character.

  Despite my respect for Jimmy’s cunning, his absolute adherence to a reformative ethos, I left Cracker on purpose after one series. We had actors coming in like Robert Carlyle, Andrew Tiernan and Susan Lynch playing fantastically complex antagonists, Robbie Coltrane with the part of a lifetime, and what was I? A TV cop? I wanted to play leads in Jimmy’s dramas, not plot characters. I wanted to be at the epicentre of shows highlighting institutional and political rancidity and social injustice. When I said I was going, no one on the show could believe it. But I wasn’t stupid. For one thing, I knew I’d get a good ending, the associated attention acting as a springboard for my ambition. For another, I knew it would appeal to Jimmy’s sense of the perverse, because back then killing off a main character so early into the life of a series just wasn’t the done thing. More recently I did it with Fortitude, the psychological thriller set in the Arctic. But by then, killing off major actors early on was vogue. We’d seen it with Sean Bean in Game of Thrones and Jed Mercurio had made it a feature of Line of Duty. I didn’t just let them do that to me in Fortitude, I positively enjoyed it. I liked the audacity of it and got to spend an afternoon with Michael Gambon. It appeals to me to surprise an audience, and with Cracker I knew I’d get a lot more attention than if I stayed. That was the ruthless side to me. I knew almost instinctively how to manipulate the system. I knew how to look after myself, which came from my dad. I could have sat in Cracker for five series, but why would I? Money, yes. But I was ambitious for me, not my bank account. I wanted Robbie’s part, but that position was intractable, and so I left.

  My instinct was entirely right. I’ll never forget the thrill of the night Bilborough died. Jimmy created the incredible ending I knew he would, and 13 million viewers watched my character perish in the street after being knifed by Robert Carlyle’s vengeful killer. It was exactly the shock I knew it would be. I can imagine many actors watching would have been saying, ‘I bet he didn’t want to leave that series.’ Wrong. That moment gave me my television career. I walked straight out of that show and my awkwardness, allied with how passionate I was about Jimmy’s writing, put me straight in line for the lead in his next project, Hearts and Minds, exactly the kind of socially relevant and intensely multi-layered drama I so desired to be in. My character, Drew Mackenzie, was a young man who goes from working in a factory to being a teacher. It was autobiographical for Jimmy because that, essentially, is what happened to him. Unlike Jude, Drew does manage to scale the educational edifice, only to have his dream beaten out of him by the institutional self-preservation and paralysis he finds inside. He is, like me, my dad, and Jimmy, another fully paid-up member of the awkward squad. I’ve played a lot of working-class men who come up against compromise and deal with it the only way they know how – head on. They headbutt it. And Drew was no different. He was also, like my dad, a man angered by work who takes it out on his family. But the true brilliance of Jimmy is to bring not only ingrained prejudice against Drew into the piece, but to draw Drew into a race row of his own making. Jimmy gives the audience an incredible problem, because they thought Drew was the hero. No other writer would have done that.

  Jimmy was such a find for me because until that point I didn’t really have a direction. I wasn’t going to do Chekhov or Shakespeare. I wasn’t going to be auditioned for it and it wasn’t a world I knew about. Then along came Jimmy who had all my influences – Dennis Potter, Play for Today, Play of the Month. He saw something in me, and that was my emotional attachment to words and language. He has the same and goes out of his way to find actors who share it. Jimmy’s genius is that he writes in the rhythms of working-class speech and how we use language. Perhaps it’s because we’re told we don’t really own language or verbal skills that we are able to articulate through our inarticulacy. We use language sparingly. Often speech is to be used quickly and briefly and like a weapon. You get in there before the next person. Language mirrors emotion, something else used sparingly. Someone once said to me, ‘There’s a lot of love in your family but not a lot of closeness.’ It wasn’t a criticism, it was an observation, and it was correct.

  I built my reputation on Jimmy. I felt I’d found in him the perfect ally. He was a man who would always put the honesty of his work before anything else. He left Brookside because they wouldn’t let him include a mention of the sinking of the Belgrano. He knew himself he was just trying to jemmy it in. What that told
him was he needed to be off. He’d gone as far as he could. Honesty with Jimmy, always honesty, with those he works with as well as his writing. He’s as critical of me, hard on me, as anybody. He hasn’t always wanted me on board. He didn’t want me as Trevor Hicks in Hillsborough because I was too young. He was right. He thought I didn’t have the emotional depth. He was right. Jimmy wanted Tom Georgeson to play Trevor and I still think he was right. But the producer and director really wanted me and so I did it. On the other hand, when I was in Sunday, Jimmy’s film about the Bloody Sunday killings, in which I played General Sir Robert Ford, Commander Land Forces Northern Ireland, he wanted me, but quite openly told me it was only because ‘We need a star.’ ‘Forget your acting ability, I need a name.’ Thanks. He redeemed himself slightly with probably the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me as an actor. He rang my house one day to talk to me but instead got my dad.

  ‘Your lad’s a wonderful actor,’ Jimmy told him.

  My dad wasn’t one to compliment, but he told me what Jimmy had said. The fact it had come from somebody within the industry, who spoke his language, was massive for him and, therefore, for me. Forget BAFTAs, Jimmy McGovern says you’re OK to your dad – now that’s big.

  I felt exactly the same rush of instinct as with Cracker when I first read the scripts for Our Friends in the North. Danny Boyle had alerted me to the project. I was on the set of Shallow Grave, stood with him at a monitor, when suddenly he looked at me – ‘I’ve seen some scripts you’ll like.’ I went straight into the office and rang my agent – ‘Our Friends in the North – can you get me in?’ The chasing of something you want – exactly what my dad would have done. So thanks, Danny, for sounding the starting gun. When I saw the writer Peter Flannery’s words, my gut instinct was confirmed. I had an immediate rush of recognition for what this was – social drama of the most ambitious and very highest order. The scene that really convinced me I wanted to be on board wasn’t one I was involved in. It was an elderly Felix having a pit bull set on him after politely trying to negotiate with a thug in a block of flats. I was intrigued by what Peter Flannery was highlighting – the working-classes turning on one another, the brutalisation of a man and his ideals, the ultimate failing of a system riven with corruption and hypocrisy. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t on screen. The point is that the scene made me think, Something is being said here and I want to be part of it. This writer feels this very deeply, and so do I.