I’m perched on the toilet, paperback in hand. I don’t have an audience – as far as I’m aware – but if I did, they would see the widest smile ever break across my face. I’ve just reached the end of Jonathan Harvey’s 1993 play Beautiful Thing, the Liverpool-born writer’s sweet tale of teenage love in inner-city London.
Channel 4 filmed it in 1996, with a screenplay by Harvey, and a quick Google search reveals that the stage show has hardly been out of production in recent years. Indeed, any time of the year, there’s a Jamie and a Ste discovering each other somewhere on the planet.
In Beautiful Thing, it’s 1993, and sixteen-year-old Jamie Gangel lives with his feisty mother, Sandra, on the Thamesmead council estate. Classmate and next-door neighbour Ste flees his …
Read the rest at The Double Negative.
(I’ve also been added to the Little Black Book, the The Double Negative’s directory of contributing freelance writers and creatives.)