Play for Today (TV Series) The Muscle Market (1981) User Reviews

Brilliant - Don't miss if repeated

[bulldogsports · 10/10 · 17 February 2009]

In this missing link between "The Black Stuff" and "Boys From" - why this wasn't included in the DVD release is a mystery - Pete Postlethwaite excels as the out of his depth Duggan and the piece has all the warmth and incisive writing you'd expect from Bleasedale. Responding to success of "The Black Stuff", the BBC commissioned Bleasdale to expand each character into a separate drama. The first of these, The Muscle Market, featured Pete Postlethwaite replacing Calder as the owner of the building contractors, and Alison Steadman. It went out under the Play for Today banner in 1981 as a stop-gap measure while Bleasdale finished writing the other five.

Danny Duggan, played by Postlethwaite, runs a failing building contractors, and resorts to sub-gangster thuggery to keep the business afloat. However, with the bottom falling out of the building game, Duggan finds that playing at gangster is only fun when you're on the winning side.

The plot is brilliant with great Black Comedy - If you Ignore the Old Cortinas, this play would stand up well today

Bleasdale ,top of the class

[rgatesy · 10/10 · 2 November 2018]

This is just so good from start to finish,.Dont miss it.

Builder's blues

[Prismark10 · 8/10 · 2 October 2013]

This is an Alan Bleasdale scripted Play for Today. You can tell, it's very good, funny. It mixes hard drama with laughs. In short entertaining.

A young Pete Postlethwaite takes the lead in a play that was a spin off from The Blackstuff.

He plays a failing building contractor and has to resort to sub-gangster thuggery to keep his precarious business afloat.

The play is very honest about the Mrs Thatcher's 1980s recession as the character keeps mentioning its coming. 'It's going to be a big one.'

It very much predicts the language of Thatcherism several years before it became common currency.

Able support is provided by Alison Steadman and this is the contractor that the Boys from the Blackstuff worked for before they had their own series.

Rich and Real

[colinprunty-1 · 9/10 · 31 August 2020]

Alan Bleasdales TV play ' Blackstuff ' spawned this prequel however this time featuring their wide boy boss Danny Duggan. The part was played by Peter Postlethwaite instead of the original David Calder and he gives a performance that arguably was the finest of a brilliant career. We see the main character who is a struggling building company boss at the onset of Thatchers Britain and the devastating recession that destroyed Liverpool in the 1980s. To get the money that is owing he uses tactics such as hiring local gangsters to terrorise his victims. The business is failing and we see his downward spiral from the opening scene although you can see he had been very successful previously in his business. Like the 'Blackstuff' it has some very funny scenes however it also has some very dark ones and the violence is more extreme and in some cases very nasty particularly the one with his secretary and mistress played superbly by a young Alison Steadman. By the end of the play you really start rooting for the main character even if he is meant to be a totally unlikeable individual. That is down to the powerful performance of Postlethwaite who was a very very fine actor . If I have a gripe and it is only a small one is that the picture scenes set to music at the beginning of each act make the play seem rushed and given the quality of the drama seems a shame because this could have easily have stretched over a few episodes and it is a shame it didn't.

Fiddling Not Failed

[mjadams-25626 · 10/10 · 20 August 2023]

Danny Duggan was not a failed or struggling business man. Things would have been fine had not his secretary, played by Alison Steadman, who had been fiddling his books for years not decided ti start fiddling on her own behalf as well; aided and abetted by his accountant who also happened to be her new boyfriend It was only when the taxman decided to call that Danny finally smelled a rat as he was no longer making any profits at all while also suffering short term cash flow problems The first thing the tax men asked him was do you have any other bank accounts ? Which Danny strenuously denied. And it wasn't until the last five minutes that it was revealed this was a lie and that Danny had indeed been stashing it away. Unfortately the taxmen also guessed this and were standing behind him, as he drew it all out. In cash.

The graphic headbutting of Alison Steadman and dragging her across the floot was probably the reason this never made it to DVD, While the "Yesterday" track at the end whoicjh accompanied the best ever ending toi anything was most certainly not being sung by Paul McCartney,.

Otherwise brilliant performances all round. One slight niggle was the detailed explanation of the auction fiddle - stripping some of the good parts out of the plant and then buying it back on the cheap when it broke down. I though this could have been handled better,

michael adams.