Real reality television Screenwriter Peter Bowker’s depictions of disabled characters in Flesh and Blood and Marvellous have captivated audiences. He tells actor Christopher Eccleston how he does it
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eter Bowker doesn’t “do diversity”. Yet, over the past couple of decades, this RTS and Bafta award-winning screenwriter has become TV’s “go-to guy” for dramas featuring people with disabilities. A comic and compelling double act, of Bowker and his long-time collaborator the actor Christopher Eccleston, entertained the RTS North West’s capacity audience at the Lowry in March. They traced the development of Bowker’s work as he has, increasingly, challenged stereotypical representations of people affected by learning disabilities. Eccleston told the audience that Bowker doesn’t “do diversity” for a very good reason, and quoted his friend as having said, “People say my writing is about diversity. But, as far as I’m concerned, it is about reality. Diversity is reality – not some distortion of reality, as it’s often portrayed.” The 2002 BBC Two drama Flesh and Blood was Bowker and Eccleston’s first major project, respectively winning them a Writer and Actor award from the RTS. In it, Eccleston plays Joe, a young man adopted at birth, who discovers that both his birth parents have learning disabilities. Shockingly for a modern-day audience, his mother had been forced to give birth by Caesarean section under a general anaesthetic and told nothing. Bowker spoke about the drama breaking important new ground. “The production process… was so fluid because both those cast members [Dorothy Cockin and Peter Kirby – the actors playing Joe’s mum and dad] actually had severe learning disabilities.”
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But this decision brought unforeseen challenges, Bowker admitted: “One director didn’t want to use learning- disabled actors.” He added: “Dorothy was a member of Celebrity Pig Theatre Company and was very comfortable with it all.” But Peter, whom Eccleston had met at Oldham’s Terence O’Grady Club, where they played pool together, had no acting experience. “It was a fine balance to protect [Peter],” Bowker said. Eccleston agreed. “It was about me, particularly, building trust with him”, especially as Eccleston’s character, Joe, is required to shout at Peter in one scene. “I could hear you between takes,” Bowker told Eccleston, “going: ‘When I’m Joe, I’m angry with you, but when I’m Chris, I love you’.” Having finished the script, the writer realised that any scenes featuring Dorothy and Peter had to be left “incredibly loose… so that [Eccleston] knew how the scene had to come out, but none of us knew how we were going to get there”. Illustrating how this worked with a clip from Flesh and Blood, where Joe gets his birth mother to hold his baby daughter for a family snap, Bowker showed how “Dorothy’s spontaneous reaction to the baby drove the whole scene”. “She touches the baby’s face… it’s a thing Dorothy did when she was moved,” added Eccleston. “And [the director] Julian Farino, who’d… trained at Granada, up here in Manchester, in documentary, captured that.” Bowker praised the cast and crew’s “willingness to be flexible”, joking “it was the best-behaved cast ever, because it’s very hard to play the twat if you have two cast members with learning disabilities.”
Flesh and Blood arose because “I was a teacher of children and adults with learning disabilities for 14 years before I was a writer, working in a ‘mental- handicap’ hospital in Leeds,” Bowker told the RTS. “And what was clear to me was that people in that hospital had sex lives, which… people were in denial about. “[I asked myself,] ‘What would happen if someone in that hospital became pregnant?’ And I carried that idea round with me until it was ready to become Flesh and Blood.” Flesh and Blood “very much looks at learning disability from the outside”, said Bowker. But BBC Two’s widely acclaimed Marvellous, based on the life of Stoke City kit man and unofficial Keele University student counsellor, Neil Baldwin, played by Toby Jones, has, as Eccleston put it, “the person with the disability at the absolute centre”. “Flesh and Blood was a story honouring that generation,” Bowker added. “Yet, parallel to those people [living in hospital], was Neil Baldwin, living this independent life of his own.… It seemed improbable until I went to meet him.” Eccleston raised an important point: “Some people questioned the ethics of having people with learning
