The Muscle Market

In this missing link between "The Black Stuff" and "Boys From" - why this wasn't included in the DVD release is a mystery - Pete Postlethwaite excels as the out of his depth Duggan and the piece has all the warmth and incisive writing you'd expect from Bleasedale. Responding to success of "The Black Stuff", the BBC commissioned Bleasdale to expand each character into a separate drama. The first of these, The Muscle Market, featured Pete Postlethwaite replacing Calder as the owner of the building contractors, and Alison Steadman. It went out under the Play for Today banner in 1981 as a stop-gap measure while Bleasdale finished writing the other five.

Danny Duggan, played by Postlethwaite, runs a failing building contractors, and resorts to sub-gangster thuggery to keep the business afloat. However, with the bottom falling out of the building game, Duggan finds that playing at gangster is only fun when you're on the winning side.

The plot is brilliant with great Black Comedy - If you Ignore the Old Cortinas, this play would stand up well today

Alan Bleasdales TV play ' Blackstuff ' spawned this prequel however this time featuring their wide boy boss Danny Duggan. The part was played by Peter Postlethwaite instead of the original David Calder and he gives a performance that arguably was the finest of a brilliant career. We see the main character who is a struggling building company boss at the onset of Thatchers Britain and the devastating recession that destroyed Liverpool in the 1980s. To get the money that is owing he uses tactics such as hiring local gangsters to terrorise his victims. The business is failing and we see his downward spiral from the opening scene although you can see he had been very successful previously in his business. Like the 'Blackstuff' it has some very funny scenes however it also has some very dark ones and the violence is more extreme and in some cases very nasty particularly the one with his secretary and mistress played superbly by a young Alison Steadman. By the end of the play you really start rooting for the main character even if he is meant to be a totally unlikeable individual. That is down to the powerful performance of Postlethwaite who was a very very fine actor . If I have a gripe and it is only a small one is that the picture scenes set to music at the beginning of each act make the play seem rushed and given the quality of the drama seems a shame because this could have easily have stretched over a few episodes and it is a shame it didn't.

This is just so good from start to finish,.Dont miss it.

This is an Alan Bleasdale scripted Play for Today. You can tell, it's very good, funny. It mixes hard drama with laughs. In short entertaining.

A young Pete Postlethwaite takes the lead in a play that was a spin off from The Blackstuff.

He plays a failing building contractor and has to resort to sub-gangster thuggery to keep his precarious business afloat.

The play is very honest about the Mrs Thatcher's 1980s recession as the character keeps mentioning its coming. 'It's going to be a big one.'

It very much predicts the language of Thatcherism several years before it became common currency.

Able support is provided by Alison Steadman and this is the contractor that the Boys from the Blackstuff worked for before they had their own series.