Interview with Peter Bowker

How did you come to write the drama?

I always start with a family, whether I’m writing Eric And Ernie, or Occupation – it’s always “what is the family dynamic like?” I’ve wanted to write something for a long time which is more like a Victorian novel if you like where there are generations - the grandfather, the sons, the grandsons and so on. I’d also wanted to write something that started around the summer of 1996. That was the first thing, it wasn’t specific to Manchester. There was just something in the air that summer, and I was quite interested. Then when I started thinking about it, the day when the IRA bombed the Arndale Centre in Manchester was the same day that England beat Scotland in Euro ‘96, and so all those ingredients started to come together. That’s often how it is for me; I have an idea about this, I have an idea about that.

The one thing I always knew, was it’s not specifically about the bomb. It’s about the people that were caught up in it, and not even caught up in it to the extent that they suffered bad injuries, but something shifted in them. What shifts in people who might have died? The main thing I wanted to start the drama with was to have a situation that is already up and running. It’s nothing to do with a bomb. It’s to do with one brother trying to get his other brother to have some sort of reconciliation with their dad. I’m just interested how pain is passed down through generations, and so I thought if we get a scene up and running that’s about that, and that scene lands, and then we hit them with a bomb. Then we’ve got a story that’s going everywhere, because you’re already concerned with how that first bit of drama is going to play out.

Why did you decide to cover the period in time?

When we were looking for the kind of road signs, the three things - obviously it starts in the summer of ‘96 - and it seemed a logical leap for me to do election night around ‘97, partly because ‘96 already felt like the end of the old Tory era, and something new was happening. The mood in the country seemed to have changed, and then it made sense to go to the Millennium.

People expected change didn’t they? There was something about 1999 to 2000. People’s concerns remained the same. It’s quite exciting to come back next week, and we’ve moved on 18 months, or we’ve moved on two years and it’s the same characters. You’re asking the audience to catch up. It goes back to the Jimmy McGovern thing: “I’d rather have an audience confused for five minutes than bored for a minute.” It’s that the rhythm of serials and series has become ‘next week’, the real time, and it’s using the medium really. It’s using television and saying, “no actually, we can come back in two years’ time and look what’s happened.”

What do you hope the audience will take away from this drama?

I would hope that people would come to it because there’s something fascinating about an era we’ve lived through so recently that seems so distant. It really does seem like a different era. But also people would come to it because the emotional story at the heart of it is universal. I don’t think you have to come from Manchester or know anything about the bomb, but I would hope through looking at this drama, that might excite a degree of interest in where we are now.