Biography
James Allen, a socialist playwright from Miles Platting, Manchester, Lancashire, is best known for his collaborations with Ken Loach. He began writing while working as a miner and, in 1958, helped launch and publish The Miner. In 1964, he submitted a script to Granada TV and was hired as a scriptwriter for the soap opera Coronation Street (1965–67), despite having little sympathy for the show. His later play, The Talking Head (1969), explores the story of a gifted writer pushed to a nervous breakdown by the demands of meeting "episode delivery dates."
Allen's first play, The Hard Word (1966), directed by Ridley Scott, aired on BBC 2 as part of the Thirty-Minute Theatre series. It was followed by The Lump (1967), the first fiction piece directed by Jack Gold, who had started in documentaries, and broadcast as part of The Wednesday Play anthology. Both plays drew from Allen's experiences in the building trade, with The Lump featuring an activist worker who often quotes Lenin and Jack London, highlighting the political themes that would define Allen's career.
Introduced to Ken Loach in 1967 by producer Tony Garnett, who had worked on The Lump, Allen’s first play directed by Loach was The Big Flame (1969) for The Wednesday Play series. This play depicts a Liverpool dockers’ strike led by a Trotskyite against the union’s wishes, which is violently suppressed by the army and police. In 1975, Allen wrote, Garnett produced, and Loach directed Days of Hope, Allen’s most famous work. This four-episode series chronicles the British Labour movement from World War I in 1916 to the General Strike of 1926 and drew significant criticism for its portrayal of the British Army.
Allen also wrote five plays for the BBC’s Play for Today series: The Rank and File (1971), A Choice of Evils (1977), The Spongers (1978), United Kingdom (1981), and Willie's Last Stand (1982), along with several episodes of the Granada series Crown Court (1975–76). Collaborating with Loach, Allen scripted three feature films: Hidden Agenda (1990), about the murder of an American civil rights activist in Belfast; Raining Stones (1993), a kitchen-sink tragicomedy set in Middleton near Manchester; and Land and Freedom (1995), Allen’s final dramatic work, which tells the story of a young idealistic Communist from Liverpool who joins the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.
Allen was diagnosed with cancer in February 1999 and passed away in June of the same year.
