Yosser Hughes

Jimmy "Yosser" Hughes is a fictional character from Alan Bleasdale's 1982 (written in 1978) television series Boys from the Blackstuff, set in Liverpool, portrayed by Bernard Hill.

Yosser appears as a tall man in his mid-thirties who wears predominantly black clothes and has a distinctive bushy moustache. He always appears unkempt and unshaven. He had a wife called Maureen, an aggressive, unloving harridan who frequently berates him and had an affair with another man, the likely father of their three children (played in the drama by Alan Bleasdale's children).

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.

In what was perhaps the most memorable episode of the series, Bleasdale showed the complete disintegration of Yosser's life as his children were taken into care, he was made homeless and finally tried to commit suicide in a lake. Constantly trying to run the gauntlet of psychiatrists, social workers and debtors, Yosser made numerous pathetic attempts to re-establish his identity and sense of self-worth, at one point gatecrashing a charity event to meet his apparent lookalike Graeme Souness. Yosser eventually ends up courting arrest by smashing a storefront window, then being arrested for head-butting one of the police officers who arrived on the scene.

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