Love Letter to Manchester

You may not know his name but he has written some of our most

This week, a new three`part drama series From

It is a bold sweeping saga about the lives

of two families ripped apart by events in the four years following

There are three battles that shape our lives ` nature versus nurture,

free will versus destiny, and City versus United.

It is the story of love, betrayal and obsession that weaves

together events like Manchester's rave scene, Euro 96,

It begins with a family battling to save itself

from the scars of separation at a meeting at a Manchester pub

That is why Daniel wanted you to see me.

I just wondered what it would take for you to turn around.

The bomb's legacy was the catalyst for a city's transformation.

Buildings can always be rebuilt but lives can be changed forever

in an instant and that is the journey Peter Bowker

He calls it his love letter to Manchester.

# But when I touch your hands, I see shooting stars.

# There is an honesty and a kindness about his writing which time and

He is a sensationally truthful writer, he does not patronise his

He writes really ballsy, tough, clever, intelligent, witty, wry,

sarcastic, you know, all the things you want to play.

What is so wonderful in his writing that he can often

start with characters that are completely the opposite to how Peter

I grew up in the suburbs, I grew up in a suburb of Manchester called

Stockport, and I grew up in a suburb of Stockport called Hazel Grove.

There is something about growing up in the suburbs which is you always

imagine life is going on elsewhere, you always imagine something

fantastic is happening in the city that you are a satellite of, and

maybe that is why you make stuff up, maybe that is just to make life

That might be one of the reasons I became a writer.

Another reason might just be my dad was a screen printer and he

often had offcuts of paper because of the size of the jobs they did.

He would bring home sheets and sheets of paper that long.

There is not a lot you can do with paper

His dramas like Occupation, Flesh and Blood, and Eric and Ernie

They take their inspiration from the Northwest and its people.

Tonight we'll be finding out why his love affair with words and where

This is Stockport Market in late October last year, the final scenes

For Peter Bowker who now lives in London it is an emotional return.

He used to come here as a boy, never dreaming he would come back

In the real world, putting words on paper is not easy

For Peter it has been a long and sometimes painful journey to get

So I went from writing very bad poetry to writing very bad novels

and then, marginally better but still bad radio plays.

After 12 years of rejections, I finally wrote an OK script.

There were two people who thought I was a writer.

Me and the person who read the script.

Relationships and family life are always at the heart of his dramas.

Every family has a secret and the secret is that we are not

Every family thinks everybody else is having a very normal life,

and you only have to scratch the surface with families to find

secrets, hidden passions, and so on, and myths.

From There To Here poses the question, "What would you do

if you thought you should have died when the bomb went off?"

For the main character, Daniel Cooton, played by Philip

Have you ever wanted to be anybody else?

And so, when I came to write From There To Here, I wanted it, above

all, to be about family myths, story telling, and people only having half

the story of even where they came from, and how those patterns repeat

And that is not to get Daniel, the central character, off the hook

completely ` he makes decisions he is responsible for but he is barely

aware of the forces that are guiding those decisions, and in a strange

way that seems to hook back to the bomb and the fact that Euro 96 was

a very optimistic point for British football but delivered us nothing.

The bomb at the time was a traumatic thing and seemed like a tragedy

So, you never know which are the good

Growing up in the North means football is part of Peter's DNA.

His obsession with Manchester United led to his first drama for TV,

the King and Us, a play about the moment former

United legend Denis Law scored a goal against Manchester City.

The King and Us is how I met Pete, I first worked with him.

It was about a moment in Manchester history when Manchester United were

relegated, and the myth was that it was

relegated by Denis Law back`healing the goal into the United net.

It's not true, it would have gone anyway.

The fact that Peter as a writer took that moment

and used it, in a way, to write about a man's fear of fatherhood.

I had one gag to do with birth and football and Denis Law, that was

my first line written and everything had to build up to that gag.

That was when the midwife saw the baby being born and

Chris Ecclestone has already seen Denis Law score for City and

so you have these crossed wires where he is telling his wife, who is

You'll never guess who scored the bloody goal.

He is a goalscorer, that is what he lives for, it's instinct!

The midwife says, the head, the head.

No, it was the backheel, Stepney never got near it.

if I live to be 100 I will never land

I am ashamed to say that I was one of the supporters who ran on

the pitch to try and get the match abandoned and the score nullified.

I have to say, the achievement of running

on that pitch in platform heels and the athletic prowess required to

evade people and slap Jim Holton on the back was worthy of an Olympic

Part of the intention of From There To Here was to write

a love letter to Manchester, and when I was thinking about what

that meant, you know, I think it had to include the good and the bad.

I think part of it is that I owe Manchester, it

is where I grew up, it is where the rhythm of my writing comes from,

it's where, to this day, I feel most at ease and when I feel I belong.

I mean, it is easy to say when you've moved away, once you have

this perspective, it is easy to write something when you have left

an attempt to capture the spirit of the place, really.

And it was the spirit of the Manchester music scene,

especially nights spent here at the legendary Electric Circus Club,

that helped inspire the writing dreams of a teenage Peter Bowker.

1976, punk happened and everything changed, really.

The sheer energy of places like Electric Circus and Rafters was

quite a contrast to Camel's Snow Goose suite at the Free Trade Hall.

All the bands that emerged there, the DIY bands, The Drones, The

the criminally underrated Manicured Noise, Certain Ratio, and I remember

we'd would go to Apollo to see an aofficial gig, and then rush across

to the Rafters to see someone like The Rezillos.

I spent all the 1970s wishing I hadn't missed out on the 1960s

but once punk happened, you thought, ah, that's here, that's now,

We knew it was going to be a good night if John Cooper Clarke

And I still love Buzzcocks to this day.

I think what they had was energy but what they brought to it was melody,

and great lyrics, and I thought Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, great

lyricists, and they also have a lot to do with the rebirth of Manchester

because they were the first band who self financed,

on their own label, a single, and that changed everything, and

made people think they could do a bit of their own stuff off as well.

# You saw my natural emotions, you made feel hurt, and I'm hurt.

# My version of doing something is an unfortunate

afternoon of trying to sell my own poetry at Stockport Market

which only became a punk experience when some one threatened me with

Thankfully, no`one bought them so no`one can bring them out and

flog them on eBay, otherwise I would have to be the highest bidder!

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside.

The Northwest has always provided moments of inspiration

Family holidays spent here on the Golden Mile later became

the key to the groundbreaking crime series Blackpool `

# You must try, try and try, try and try, you succeed at last.

# Blackpool on the surface of it, it was a very, you know,

when you first look at episode one you see a very fluffy, candy floss,

But it very quickly descends into quite a dark,

dismal sort of place and the decline of Ripley Holden and his friends.

So it is quite a big statement, really, that he was trying to make

with Blackpool, so it worked on many levels.

That is why it was so massively successful, really.

We had no idea it would be such a hit.

It was such a risk to take at that time.

# I'm losing sleep over the secrets that you keep.

# I'm losing sleep over the secrets that you keep.

17 years ago, in the days before Media City at Salford, Peter

felt he had no option but to move his family down to London to get

his voice heard, in the television industry corridors of power.

It is one thing writing a drama, it is another getting it

I got my first professional commission in 1991,

so that's 22 years this year and I still feel that every

commission I have is going to be the last.

It's not a secure business and I was a teacher

and I left what was a secure job to do this and it's just a case

of sort of getting on with it, owning your ideas and finding a

I suppose, finding a way to put those insecurities on the page,

And Peter often uses humour to do just that.

We live and breathe the stuff here in the North.

They say you have to be funny to live here.

In reality, you have to live here to be funny.

This is the face that launched 1,000 quips.

Eric's life story inspired Peter to write Eric and Ernie,

a drama about the early days of Morecambe and Wise.

He wanted to honour the greatest double at the country has ever

produced. There is a heartbreaking moment when they have to sack Sadie.

and Ernie are finally letting Sadie go, as it were, and it is going to

come as a shock to her and it is a big turning point in the whole plot.

I want it to have a kind of real understatement,

whilst also really pulling your heartstrings.

Eric. Be patient, keep them closed. Keep them closed. Sadie.

That's no way to talk about your only child.

You can open them now. Ham and eggs? What the heck is this in aid of?

We've landed a tour. Number two circuit. ?25 a week. ?25 a

week? When do we start? He didn't mean you. He meant us.

And then the director did a wonderful sequence where Eric

When he is not writing in his study in London, Peter likes to

I like coming here because you can unwind. It's very nice.

Always pretty empty and the main reason

though is I've got a dog to walk. She's over there.

And I've got cholesterol you could plaster the walls with.

My uncle Ron told me that whisky burnt the fur off your arteries.

so I've got a dog and I do long walks now instead.

I don't find this kind of landscape that inspiring, to be honest.

It is beautiful and I love being here. It's a bonus.

But I've always walked. Wherever I'v lived, I've always walked.

You can unravel plot and put plot back together, but I don't

think I'm going to be writing an ode to a nightingale any day now.

I love this part of the park because you get this...

I don't know if you can see it, but you get this massive sweep,

Right on the top there, from the top, you can

see the Royal Ballet School in that direction

and Wembley Stadium over there, two great high and low cultural icons.

I'm not a great... This is as countryside as I go.

I like to be within the sound of traffic.

I get a bit insecure if all I can hear is birds.

It becomes too Deliverance for me. So, yeah, this suits me.

Just going to grab the dog from the deer.

This is Flesh and Blood, one of Peter's most poignant

It is about a man adopted at birth who later discovers his real

parents have learning disabilities and never knew they had a child.

How long have you been here? I don't know.

Peter adapted key roles of the mother

and father in the play for Dorothy Cockin

and Peter Kirby who themselves have learning disabilities. In this

scene, Chris Ecclestone's character Joe meets his birth

mother for the first time. Hiya. Janet, this is Joe. Hello, Janet.

I have got a little baby. I was like that once and you are... You are my

dad. I just wanted to say it out loud. You did not understand a word

of that, did you? No. and Blood is that it's a

story about ordinary people's lives. We shot it on a tiny budget.

Nobody really got paid much money. We shot it in a very modest style,

but it had great power because it was written and hopefully

performed and shot truthfully. But it didn't need to take place

on the Titanic, it didn't need huge backdrops,

it just needed flesh, blood and magic which I think was

actually the original title. Flesh, Blood and Magic. It was the

BBC, in their wisdom, shortened it. I wanted to write about the world

and it was only when I left that world a few years later, I could

look at it fresh. I wanted to write about parenthood and I wanted to

write again about family and how you construct yourself. One of his most

successful series was Occupation about the Iraq war and the

devastating effects it has on the relationships of three friends who

were soldiers from Manchester. I think what Pete was so brilliant at

in that was of course in the grander picture you are talking about a

conflict, but what interested him of course was how it impacts on people,

not only on the soldiers themselves, but on their relationships, the

domino effect of how many people are connected to that one person. At

times, his writing can be painfully honest. This scene reveals how

difficult some soldiers found that to show their emotions when

adjusting back to family life. It is the unspoken words that say so much.

Hello. You all right? Very good. Good. You go ahead.

Will your wife be wondering where you got to? Unusually, Peter had an

active role in the editing. For a writer to get in the edit in the

first place, it takes a bit of doing in York were a. New writers do not

get that privilege. `` in your career. Good editors want the writer

in their even if it is only to nail what you intended to do with the

narrative. What I find trickiest is stepping back from my own taste

because the editor has a skull, the director has a school, the producer

has a skill, the music people have a skill `` the editor and the director

have skills. It is what works for the story, not what works for me as

a vanity project. If it was just me, they would have the words really

loud. Sometimes one word says it all. So. So. Still alive then. We

macro unless we died in the night and went to heaven `` unless we died

in the night and went to heaven. On the surface, he was a very

conventional character. As the story unfolds, he goes through a very

unconventional process. A lot of people might think this guy is just

a serial adulterer. Towards the end, I think the really strong

characters, which is down to Peter, they are the women. His wife,

Claire, and Joanne. Oh, God. Who are you? His wife. Who are you? When I

am writing, without it sounding too borderline ill, I think it is

conversations I hear in my head. I cannot get it down quick enough. It

is very much about rhythm. I don't know what I am doing when I am doing

it but I can see if something has a rhythm when I look back, if it has

got a conversational rhythm. My dad died in a pub cellar. He was an

alcoholic. Lost him, he went just like that. 54. He annoyed the living

daylights out of me but I missed the aggravation of the day. Your point

is? When I missed the aggravation of the day. Your point is? When I'm not

around to annoy you anymore, you will miss me. It is good. But don't

expect a call from thought for the day any time soon. I wrote long

before anybody looked at my work, long before anybody thought it was

worth buying my work. It is an itch I have to scratch every day. It is a

bit of a cliche, writing is something I have to do, but it

really is. The world makes more sense to me if it is written down

and dramatised. I think fundamentally that story is the way

that we process the world. At the market, filming has finished and

Peter's journey is nearly complete. But for the man who knows how to

make a drama out of a crisis, there is still some words to say. In an

age when every tweet, e`mail, Facebook entry, news bulletin, it

does not explain a story, it distorts and twists the story and

gives it an angle. The way I look at it, the irony is that drama might

now be the only truth we have. The end.

# The sky # In the sky

# In the sky # Because I'm trying to

put things right. Did I die?

Not yet. But it can be arranged. All the lies.

Does that just cost you nothing? Because I'm trying to

put things right. Every one of us has lied.

Every single one of us.