Stuff. The result was the BAFTA winning series Boys from the Blackstuff, which was transmitted on BBC2 in 1982. Bernard Hill starred in the role of Yosser Hughes, whose catch-phrase "Gizza job" became synonymous with the mass unemployment of the Thatcher years. The series established Bleasdale as one of Britain's leading television writers and social commentators. Bleasdale wrote the screenplay for his only feature film No Surrender (1985), a black comedy which examines the animosity between the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland. Set in a seedy Liverpool night club, the film focuses on a group of elderly Protestant hardliners attending a New Year's Eve party on the same evening as a group of Catholic retirees. Bleasdale adapted William Allison and John Fairley's 1978 book The Monocled Mutineer into a four part miniseries in 1986. The series, starring Paul McGann, dramatises the WWI Etaples Mutiny of 1917. In 1987, Charlottetown Festival director Walter Learning presented the Canadian premiere of the Bleasdale musical Are You Lonesome Tonight? at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, a national arts centre located on Prince Edward Island. The musical, which took a tough look at the life of Elvis Presley, attracted controversy at a festival for its coarse language and adult subject matter. Regardless of the objections, brought up in the provincial legislature, the play was a success for the festival. Bleasdale penned the political drama G.B.H. (Great British Holiday) for Channel 4 in 1991. Focussing on the political upheaval of the Labour Party in Liverpool, G.B.H. pits mild-mannered protagonist Jim Nelson against the northern City Council leader Michael Murray. In 1994, Bleasdale collaborated with Keith Thompson and David Jones on an anthology of four filmed dramas written by authors who had no prior screenwriting credits. The scripts were chosen from a pool of 2,000 applicants, with Bleasdale acting as producer/mentor to each of the four writers chosen and then working on the projects from start to finish. The films, Andrew Cullen's Self Catering, Raymond Murtagh's Requiem Apache, Jim Morris' Blood On the Dole, and Christopher Hood's Pleasure, were screened over four consecutive weeks in October of that year. Bleasdale continued his work for Channel 4 with 1995's serial Jake's Progress, the story of a modern-day dysfunctional family (Robert Lindsay as the father and Julie Walters as the mother) struggling to cope with a "difficult" child (Barclay Wright). In 1999, Bleasdale adapted Charles Dickens'