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RICKY TOMLINSON
The Waterfront Hall, Belfast: Saturday 6th September
Tickets: £30 available from
The Waterfront Box Office: 028 90 334455
To millions, Ricky Tomlinson, in the guise of TV's Jim Royle, is the Sultan of
Sloth. But behind the extraordinary success of the star of The Royle Family,
lies a story of poverty, prison and banjo-playing!
Thirty years ago, Ricky Tomlinson languished in a prison cell in solitary
confinement, a radical and uncompromising trade unionist imprisoned for his
political beliefs.
The story of Ricky Tomlinson is really the story of two men. One, a natural
performer with a talent to amuse: teller of corny jokes, seasoned actor and
banjo virtuoso. The other, an unrepentant working-class warrior, a radical
Socialist who has staunchly refused to compromise his old-fashioned ideology.
Ricky Tomlinson was born in Liverpool in 1939, during the first month of the
Second World War. His childhood was hard: "I'm not getting the violin out," he
told an interviewer, "but there were six of us in a two-bedroom house".
The son of a baker, early hopes of a career as a footballer (he was offered, but
turned down, a trial for Scunthorpe United) took second place to playing banjo
in Liverpool's pubs and clubs. He eventually moved to Wrexham after meeting and
marrying a local woman and he found work digging holes for a construction
company building the A483 Wrexham bypass and to which he refers in his
autobiography, Ricky.
Then came his involvement in the 1972 builders' strike during which he organised
flying pickets and refused to testify in court against his fellow strikers. This
earned him a two-year prison sentence for conspiracy which he has said he will
challenge in court. Ricky Tomlinson served his time in 14 prisons, mostly in
solitary confinement because, as he puts it: "I wouldn't wear any clothes."
He developed a passion for classical music and, through one prison governor, who
was an ex-bricklayer, discovered socialist theory. "He gave me a copy of The
Ragged Trousered Philanthropist," says Tomlinson, "which I have read and sent
copies of all over the world."
On his release from prison in 1975, Ricky Tomlinson found himself blacklisted
from the building trade so he set himself up as an entertainer, theatrical agent
and pub landlord, to varied success. But his life was transformed in 1980 when
the director Alan Bleasdale, who had seen Tomlinson's stage routine a year
earlier, cast him in a minor role in the acclaimed series Boys From The
Blackstuff. With his grizzled face and world-wise manner, he was a natural for
parts in Jim Allen's United Kingdom, Ken Loach's bleak Riff Raff and, most
notably, as the bolshie trade unionist Bobby Grant in Brookside.
His transformation to national superstar, though, came in 1998 when, reunited
with his Brookside screen wife Sue Johnston, he starred as grumpy Dad in The
Royle Family.
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