Jonathan Harvey writes people on estates who are funnier than they have any right to be and warmer than they let on. In Beautiful Thing the comedy and the tenderness share a room; in Gimme Gimme Gimme the jokes drown everything.
Fi1m perspective
Linda Henry's Sandra Gangel in Beautiful Thing (1996) can be exasperated with her son and devoted to him in the same breath, and she runs the comedy without ever seeming to have stepped into a different film. That is the Jonathan Harvey character: a loud woman in a flat who is funnier than her circumstances and kinder than her voice. He has written her more than once, and his work is better when she is in it.
The stage came first. Beautiful Thing was a play at the Bush Theatre in 1993 before Hettie Macdonald filmed it, and it is set on the Thamesmead estate where Harvey taught for four years. He then created and wrote Gimme Gimme Gimme (1999) for Kathy Burke, wrote on At Home with the Braithwaites (2000) with Sally Wainwright and Katie Baxendale, and in 2004 joined Coronation Street, where he has written hundreds of episodes over two decades, with Shameless and Call the Midwife alongside. Television is where most of the work is.
What he does well is change gear inside a scene, from a joke to something that hurts and back, without the join showing. In Beautiful Thing the supporting characters are allowed to be awkward and contradictory rather than wise or cruel. The weakness is in the same film: the two boys are clearer about what they want than about who they are, and we wanted the ordinary detail that would tell them apart away from each other. Gimme Gimme Gimme loses the gear change and keeps only the loud gear. Every joke is about sex, weight or somebody's face, and every joke is announced before it arrives. We laughed at Burke's Linda La Hughes and then felt faintly ashamed, because the line was the one about her looks we had already heard twice that episode, and she had landed it by force of will alone.
On the Street he is one of the writers with an ear for how people in a pub talk: round the subject, in insults, with the real matter saved for the door. What he does less well is the long game. On At Home with the Braithwaites the secret carried two series, then the writers went looking for replacements, and by the fourth series everyone is shouting in a marquee. Harvey writes the scene better than the arc.
He has said of Beautiful Thing: "I wanted to write a play about two boys falling in love and give it a happy ending. During the Aids crisis, it was unusual for a gay character to be alive at the end of a drama." That is still the thing to start with. After it, find a good night on the Street, where the same people are still at the bar, still talking round whatever it is.
Biography
Jonathan Harvey is an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Liverpool in 1968, he studied psychology and education at Hull University and worked for several years as a special-needs teacher in a comprehensive school before becoming a full-time writer.
His breakthrough came with the stage play Beautiful Thing (1993), which he adapted for the 1996 film of the same name. He has written extensively for television, including episodes of Gimme Gimme Gimme (1999–2001), Coronation Street, Shameless and Call the Midwife. His stage plays have received awards including the George Devine Award and the John Whiting Award.
