This interview with Willy Russell was recorded at the Cornerstone Building of Liverpool Hope University in May 2006. Willy Russell is an alumnus of the university, having previously tried careers in hairdressing and labouring. He is the author of some of the most successful and much-performed stage plays of recent decades, including Stags and Hens (1978), Educating Rita (1980), Shirley Valentine (1986) and the West End musical Blood Brothers (1983). He has adapted his stage plays for the cinema, and has a string of highly successful original TV commissions to his credit: Our Day Out (1977), Daughters of Albion (1979), One Summer (1984) and Terraces (1993). ‘His plays tell stories of dreams, aspirations, escape and the pursuit of happiness. His characters strive to flee from a deadly, stifling environment and achieve something finer – or at least they dream of doing so.’

JB: Commentators invariably describe you as a ‘Liverpool playwright’ but later work, such as your novel The Wrong Boy (2000) and the album Hoovering the Moon (2004), make me see you as a much more of a polymath.

WR: The ‘Liverpool’ tag is something that one is never going to be able to shake. The fact that I work primarily as a dramatist, that I write for performance is probably completely bound up with ‘Liverpool-ness’, what being a Liverpudlian is. All the most well-known Liverpool forms are in the spoken rather than the written word. That's not to omit or overlook such writers as Beryl Bainbridge, Ramsey Campbell and other very good writers of prose, but when thinking of Liverpool and writing I think that the first artists who come to mind are those from a spoken/sung rather than literary background – firstly the post-war comedians: the Tommy Handleys, the Arthur Askeys, the Ted Rays. They didn't use the Liverpool accent because it wasn't acceptable at that point, and so they would adopt either a lower-middle-class accent or either a vaguely northern idiom. But although this first wave of Liverpool comedians were not remotely ‘Scouse’ in their language or their comedy, nevertheless the work came out of a certain kind of Liverpool observation of the world, an irreverence, a capacity for put-down and for pricking pomposity. Then, of course, after that you had the massive explosion of Merseybeat.