On a late Saturday morning in the winter of 1979/80, I clambered into a battered transit van and headed for a pit village just outside Newcastle. I was about to spend an extraordinary afternoon in the company of some people I would never forget.
Squashed like sardines into the van alongside me were the six members of Bruvvers, a community theatre group based in Byker. I was there to write a feature on them as part of a one-year course designed to equip me for a career in journalism.
Media degrees hadn’t been invented then. Instead, kids like me left school at 18, enrolled on a pre-entry course to study shorthand, the basics of newspaper law and local government and to find their way around a typewriter before joining a paper as a trainee reporter.
My proposed feature on Bruvvers was all about learning on the job, even though I didn’t have one at the time. I’d already interviewed founder Mike Mould and administrator Jimmy Swan earlier in the company’s cramped office above a shop in Shields Road, having previously read about funding cuts threatening their very existence.
How to overcome funding cuts
In the Evening Chronicle, a Conservative councillor was quoted as saying he’d rather fund the Scouts or the Girl Guides having been to a Bruvvers show, describing them as “a bunch of weirdos jumping about making political points.”
That was enough to make me want to find out more. As it turned out, Mike and Jimmy were larger than life, full of fun and laughs despite surviving on a shoestring, and definitely not weird. Political? Of course they were. Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street and the nearby shipyards on the Tyne were in freefall ushering in an era of mass unemployment.
Bruvvers were also politically savvy enough to operate as a co-operative. That arrangement saved their bacon when the funding cuts were eventually confirmed by regional arts body Northern Arts, which switched financial support away from a number of small companies to bringing the Royal Shakespeare Company to Newcastle on a regular basis instead.
As you might imagine, the move went down like a lead balloon in certain circles and most of the small arts companies folded, unable to afford to continue paying their staff who were Equity members.
As a co-op, Bruvvers were self-employed and paid themselves well below the Equity rate. They were usually skint but they bucked the trend and survived. Bruvvers also didn’t have the overheads of a bricks and mortar venue to worry about. The van was their only major asset.
“We perform in transit!” was how Mike described it.
Birth of an exceptional theatre company
He originally formed Bruvvers in his native London in the late 1960s with his real-life brother Roy, who later adopted the stage name of Marsden and found fame playing PD James’ fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh in a long-running TV series.
Mike’s stage career would take a very different path, moving north to Newcastle where he started working in local youth theatre while nurturing the idea of re-launching Bruvvers as a stand-alone outfit. Later, in the mid-1980s, Roy would loan Mike the necessary funds to buy a derelict Victorian flax mill in neighbouring Ouseburn next door to Byker to realise his ambition of creating a community-based arts hub with its own stage.
The building was so dilapidated it cost relative peanuts to buy and was unofficially christened ‘The Fun Palace’ by Mike who initially moved into the empty top floor with just a mattress, a cooking stove, and a frying pan. Today it’s better known as 36 Lime Street, housing over 50 artists, designers and makers who operate as a collective.
When I met up with them, this was all yet to happen.
Without a home of their own, Bruvvers performed wherever they could – usually schools, community centres, and social clubs – delivering in-your-face education-based theatre mainly aimed at kids in the manner of a touring punk rock band. At their peak, they were playing to around 50,000 children and adults every year.
Sadly, I don’t have a copy of the story I wrote at the time but this quote from Mike in a later interview sums up the company’s ethos:
“Our brief is to play to the disadvantaged, to take shows to communities and people who would not normally ever see theatre. Most of our punters would go and see a panto four or five times in their lives and these would be their only visits to a theatre.
“When they go, they are put off. They still feel it’s not for them. The places are frightening and daunting. Our mission over the years is to encourage them to give it a try.”
While most of the self-written shows laced with humour and Geordie culture were targeted at kids, they would also attempt to engage an older audience with some productions. The trip I went on fell into the latter category as I found myself in a working men’s club watching Mike and the gang deliver their own take on the story of Punch and Judy.
Instead of simply performing a human version of the traditional seaside puppet show, they also tackled the subject of domestic violence. It was like watching a cleverly-written pantomime. There was enough knockabout comedy to make the kids laugh, while some of the jokes intended for the watching adults in the mixed-age audience also carried a darker message.
The show’s title was “Punchin’ ‘ell out of ‘er” – a play of words on the original 17th century Italian theatrical comedy character Pulcinella, who eventually evolved into England’s Mr Punch. It was a tricky balancing act but they made it work.
Afterwards, they handed out brightly-coloured plastic Bruvvers badges to the kids and information leaflets with emergency helpline telephone numbers on them to the grown-ups who were mostly mothers.
From writing a Bruvvers news feature, to a career in journalism
Grateful for their hospitality and for providing me with an abundance of material for my feature, I probably didn’t fully realise at the time how genuinely ground-breaking this DIY drama on your doorstep actually was. Remember, some of the pubs and social clubs they were performing in still had regular Sunday lunchtime striptease shows and even the occasional men-only smoke rooms.
Thanks to Mike, Jimmy and the gang, my news feature cut the mustard and helped me secure the necessary qualifications I needed to embark on what would be a career working in local journalism, ending up as senior reporter on the Hull Daily Mail.
I was reminded of those distant days recently while reading a new Hull City Council report giving an update on community safety issues. The report revealed the number of referrals to Hull’s Domestic Abuse Partnership (DAP) so far this year has already exceeded the highest ever annual total. Figures for the period up to the end of September show 5,065 referrals to the council-run partnership which offers a range of support services to anyone aged 16 or over.
Those services include housing advice and support with access to emergency accommodation, help with accessing civil and criminal legal options and a scheme providing enhanced home safety and security. An accompanying chart shows a steady increase in the annual figure, from 2,211 referrals in 2020 to 4,997 last year. Although the DAP also supports male victims of domestic abuse, the overwhelmingly majority of referrals it deals with are women.
Of course, the figures are only the tip of a very large and ugly iceberg. They relate to people who are now on the DAP radar. Many more victims of physical violence, coercion, online harassment, or financial abuse remain unknown, unseen, unheard.
On a more positive note, the steady rise in referrals might also reflect a greater willingness for people in exceptionally difficult circumstances to reach out for help. In addition, the suite of professional support services available today through bodies like DAP are almost certainly far more extensive and sophisticated than were on offer via the helpline number printed by Bruvvers on their leaflets 45 years ago.
Bruvvers, and the societal importance of theatre
However, in the same report I was also pleased to read about something very familiar going on. A section highlighted a recent series of shows in 15 Hull schools performed by Manchester-based touring theatre charity Odd Arts as part of a national programme to counter the risk of young people being radicalised into taking part in terrorist activity. Overall, just over 5,200 students saw the shows.
It’s unlikely they featured any Bruvvers-style slapstick but I’m sure the late, great Mike Mould (who sadly died in 2020) would have approved.
