Voted the city's most popular writer by a readers’ poll conducted by Liverpool City Libraries in 2003, Bleasdale's dramas, alongside those of his contemporaries Willy Russell and Jimmy McGovern, epitomize for many people the essence of ‘Liverpool style’. Throughout a career spanning over thirty years, Bleasdale has written fifteen stage plays, fourteen works for television, a film and two novels, but it is for the memorable characters in television dramas, such as Boys from the Blackstuff and GBH, that he is most well known. Considered by many critics his finest work, these ‘state of the nation’ dramas situated Bleasdale amongst the foremost political dramatists of his generation. Bleasdale's work is characterized by the depth and complexity of his male characters: anxious, tormented individuals often coping with the entrapment, despair and madness created by unemployment in the 1980s and the shift in gender roles that accompanied changing patterns of employment in the 1990s. As the 1990s progressed, Bleasdale expanded his repertoire, moving away from political dramas and exploring such genres as the crime thriller and classic novel adaptation. With the release on DVD in July 2006 of his work for Channel Four, GBH, Jake's Progress and Melissa, he was in a contemplative mood and agreed to discuss the relationship of his background to his work and the question of whether there is something that could be called a unique Liverpool style.

Bleasdale began by talking about his early life, not in Liverpool as he quickly points out, but in Huyton, ‘where I could see the borders of Liverpool from my bedroom window’. His parents were from large Liverpool families and had grown up in the dockland housing areas either side of the Pier Head, Mill Street and Scotland Road.

‘My father was the last of thirteen children born in 1917, my mother the last of ten children born in 1918. My father was born six months after my grandfather died in 1917, so my grandmother with her thirteen children lived just off Scotland Road and brought up thirteen children. Three of them died in the 1920s due to diphtheria, polio and flu epidemics. She brought them up in extreme poverty with no man at her side, my father never knew his father.’