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.