Jim Allen wrote beautifully about real people's lives and made me realise the importance of the writing
My TV hero is the writer Jim Allen. His television play The Spongers, which was broadcast in the late 70s, is the single most important drama for me; the drama that made me want to work in television. I remember watching it with my mum when I was about 12 years old. It's a devastating piece of work, showing the disintegration of a family. I still think it's one of the greatest dramas I've ever seen.
Allen wrote a number of Plays for Today, of which The Spongers is one, and a four-part series called Days of Hope, which told the story of the British Labour movement. He wrote beautifully about real people's lives. I wasn't going to the theatre ? it wasn't really within my cultural reach. But television was. To use that cliche, it was my window on the world.
I felt that "art" ? film, or theatre, or poetry ? was an exclusive club for the middle classes. And then on television I could see the stories of ordinary, working-class people. I could place myself within that. When I was at drama school, searching for an identity and surrounded by Shakespeare and Ibsen, someone gave me a copy of Hobson's Choice, which is set in Salford. I realised I'd absorbed all this stuff ? and Spongers was the play that came back to me.
Everything in my career is about the writing. The Spongers is beautifully directed by Roland Joffe and excellently acted, but none of that could have happened without Allen. Watching his stuff led me to have strong relationships with writers; it made me realise the importance of the writing.
Allen is probably most famous for the three films he wrote for Ken Loach: Hidden Agenda, Raining Stones, and Land and Freedom. In the late 80s there was controversy over his play Perdition, which didn't open after accusations of antisemitism. He died in 1999 without receiving the recognition he deserved, perhaps because he told stories about ordinary people and was very idealistic in his writing, which isn't always very fashionable. Allen always tried to leave a place better than he found it.
Christopher Eccleston appears in The Shadow Line on Thursdays, 9pm, BBC2
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/24/my-tv-hero-jim-allen
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