Peter Terson

Peter Terson (born 16 February 1932, Newcastle-upon-Tyne) is a British playwright whose plays have been produced for stage, television and radio. His early work in the 1960s focused on growing up in the dead-end working-class culture of industrial England. He was born as Peter Patterson. From 1956 - 1958 Peter was trained at Redland Teacher Training College in Bristol, a college of Bristol University. He taught for 10 years before writing professionally. He taught at what was then Blackminster County Secondary School, near Littleton, Worcestershire. He taught history and P.E. Peter left Blackminster in the mid-1960s.

Plays such as Zigger Zagger, about football hooligans and their pursuit of drink, sex, and trouble, and The Apprentices, showing the cruelties between young men learning industrial trades, presented a dismal view of life with few means of escape. In Zigger Zagger an apprenticeship was the escape from the hooligan lifestyle. These two plays were also taken up by local theatre groups and even appeared in school productions, with local adaptations by the producers for accent, dialect, soccer teams and related slang. Hans Neuenfels' Heidelberg-production of Zikke Zakke has been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in 1969

Later works for television took a more optimistic view, especially a series of plays centering on a trio of Yorkshiremen, led by Art (Brian Glover), and their humorous misadventures. At about the same time he wrote Pinvin Careless and his Lines of Force, a parable about a man at the end of his life pursuing his obsession with ley lines and related pseudo-phenomena, while remembering his upbringing under a stern father in a cricket-obsessed village culture. Terson treated the situation of men dealing with life in the modern de-industrialized North in the play Strippers which ran in London's West End theatres.

Several of his plays have been produced by the National Youth Theatre. In Belgium his play The Mighty Reservoir (in Dutch: Het Machtig Reservoir) reached more than 500 performances by the MMT, a theatre in Mechelen, and a TV-adaption by the BRT, Belgian Television.

External links

• Peter Terson at the Internet Movie Database.
• Entry at Biography.com.
• Entry at the Online Encyclopedia of World Drama.