Pilot Episode
The pilot of Blackstuff implies that Hughes worked in the Middle East at some time during the 1970s and later bought a house that was beyond the family's means. In the original pilot episode, he appeared comparatively sane, but displayed macho insecurities that would make his redundancy especially hard to take. When the boys were swindled out of their savings in Middlesbrough, Yosser reacted particularly badly, showing the first signs of the nervous breakdown that would characterise his behaviour in the 1982 series.
The first episode of the series saw Yosser collecting social security from a Liverpool DHSS and making an unexpected appearance at an illegal building site, organised by a corrupt Irish contractor called Molloy. When Molloy took him to task over a badly-built wall, Hughes headbutted him and kicked down the wall, storming off with his much-loved children in tow.
Read more about this topic: Yosser Hughes
Famous quotes containing the words pilot and/or episode:
“With two sons born eighteen months apart, I operated mainly on automatic pilot through the ceaseless activity of their early childhood. I remember opening the refrigerator late one night and finding a roll of aluminum foil next to a pair of small red tennies. Certain that I was responsible for the refrigerated shoes, I quickly closed the door and ran upstairs to make sure I had put the babies in their cribs instead of the linen closet.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)