Peter Bowker puts an ordinary family in a room with something too large for it and lets them talk round it. On Clocking Off and in his disability dramas that works beautifully; given a whole holiday park and a Shakespeare, he can lose the knack.
Fi1m perspective
A man stops in the middle of a crime story and mouths along to someone else's pop song. That is the Peter Bowker trick most people remember, from Blackpool (2004), and it tells you one true thing about him: he will try the odd idea. It is also a little misleading, because most of his work is quieter than that. What he usually does is put a family in a room with something too large for it, an autistic son, a birth parent they have never met, a war arriving at the door, and let them talk about something else until they cannot.
He learned that in the long-running shows. He wrote for Casualty from 1992, and the better episodes of that series are the ones with a writer's fingerprint on them: a patient who is allowed to be funny, a nurse who gets to be wrong. On Clocking Off (2000), Paul Abbott's series about a Manchester textile factory, he was one of the writers who held the house style, where each hour has the shape of a short story and nobody announces a theme. It is the best thing his name is on, and he did not create it. The originals came after: Flesh and Blood (2002), Blackpool, Occupation (2009), Marvellous (2014), The A Word (2016) and World on Fire (2019), the last two his own creations.
Two habits run through all of it. The first is disability. He taught in a special-needs unit in Leeds for years before he wrote for a living, and Flesh and Blood, Marvellous and The A Word all put learning disability or autism at the centre of the story and build the family round it. The second is the ensemble. Occupation follows servicemen home from Iraq; World on Fire follows ordinary families across Europe, and Bowker wanted a Polish or French household to matter to us as much as a British one. He keeps his actors, too: Christopher Eccleston, James Nesbitt, Stephen Graham and Toby Jones recur. "If an actor gets the emotional rhythm of my work, I hang on to them," he has said, and the scripts bear it out.
What does not always work is scale. ShakespeaRe-Told (2005) was his series, four plays stripped of verse and handed to four writers, and handing them on was the good decision. David Nicholls and Peter Moffat made proper television of theirs. Bowker kept A Midsummer Night's Dream for himself and set it in a holiday park, and we sat through the mechanicals' play, the easiest laugh Shakespeare ever wrote, waiting for it to land, and it did not; the 90 minutes felt like more. His bigger serials have drawn a milder version of the same complaint, that Desperate Romantics (2009) reaches for more than it holds, and that World on Fire is hard to keep moving across a second series.
Start with Clocking Off, then Marvellous. He is at his best in a kitchen with a cup of tea going cold, and he seems to know it; it is when he books the holiday park that we start checking the clock.
Biography
Peter Bowker is a British playwright and screenwriter. He began his career writing episodes for the BBC medical drama series Casualty in the early 1990s, following seven years of teaching in a Leeds hospital unit for people with intellectual disabilities and an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
He is known for original television works including the musical drama Blackpool (2004), the military drama Occupation (2009), the biographical film Marvellous (2014) and the wartime series World on Fire (2019). He has also adapted material such as Wuthering Heights (2009) and Capital (2015). Bowker has received multiple Royal Television Society awards for writing.
