Hull Blokes - History

History

In May 2002, Gill Adams, a Hull-born playwright, used her column in the Hull Daily Mail to advertise for men to join a series of writing workshops funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation.

The project was actually part of the BBC’s Northern Exposure ‘Writing in the Margins’ initiative, spearheaded by the Corporation’s then creative director of new writing, Kate Rowland. Adams led the workshops for a year with exercises, discussions and readings, and it was she who coined the group’s title. The term ‘Blokes’ was certainly being used by the time the group featured in Ariel in December 2002. In April 2003, the focus of the project – King of the Road, a six-part serial telling of the comings and goings of a local (fictional) taxi firm – received its first public reading in the Haworth Arms on Hull’s Beverley Road.

Gill Adams’ contract with the BBC ended in the same month. The Blokes, however, had achieved a level of self-determination and success and decided to continue. They applied for and were awarded City Arts funding which enabled them to take part in Humber Mouth, the annual Hull Literature Festival. Their first ‘independent’ show was Counter Act, an evening of eight short plays performed at the Dorchester Hotel, Hull, on 13 November 2003. The group has continued, in subsequent years, to make regular contributions to Humber Mouth.

King of the Road was eventually broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside in March 2004.