a b Michael Patterson, Strategies of Political Theatre: Postwar British Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 69. The Jenin play was never produced. There have been quite a few such disappointments in Griffiths' life – an extraordinary number, actually, when you consider that this man co-wrote the 1981 epic Reds, starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. Reds was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including best screenplay, and won three. Comedians, Griffiths' classic 1975 piece set in a night-school class for stand-up artists, made an international star of actor Jonathan Pryce after it transferred to Broadway. The play, set in Griffiths' native Manchester, remains the most powerful artistic contribution to the enduring debate as to where bold irreverence stops, and bullying begins, in that branch of theatre.

Comedians: racist and sexist standups who messed with audiences' minds". the Guardian. 20 February 2015. She explained Griffiths is keen to engage with the probation service adding it is 'certainly a fall from grace for a 61-year-old man with no previous convictions'.a b c d e Robert Chalmers, "Putting the world to rights: Trevor Griffiths on Olivier's dope-smoking, Marxist ranting and his 20-year purgatory", The Independent, 9 August 2009. Griffiths, T. (2005) Charles Allen Clarke (1863-1935), Socialist, Journalist, Novelist and Dialect Sketch Writer. In: Matthew, H. and Harrison, B. (eds.) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, pp. on-line A Warrington grandad-of-24 offered a 'teenage boy' a McDonald's in exchange for a hotel stay where he planned on sexually abusing him. There are quite a few things Trevor Griffiths has no time for, chief among them the cult of celebrity. He starts talking about Rogue's Gallery, last summer's extraordinary concert of sea shanties organised by producer Hal Willner and performed at the Barbican, with a cast that included Shane MacGowan, Martha Wainwright and Ralph Steadman. He mentions, in passing, that the actor and director Tim Robbins, who also sang that night, had spent the whole afternoon with him, before going on stage.

Griffiths' reputation at the time was such that Warren Beatty asked him to write a screenplay for a project about the US revolutionary John Reed, which eventually became the Oscar-winning film Reds (1981), but Griffiths departed from the project before the script was completed and estimates that he had written only 45% of the script for the finished film. [2]

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I was driving my three kids down to Southampton, to see the husband of the friend who'd gone to Cuba with Jan. They had four children. He told me, when I got there. It just broke us, as a family. It broke our lives. Sian was 11, Emma was 10 and Jess was nine. There was no funeral. We went to the grounds of Harewood House, near Leeds, the four of us. And we sat on this knoll where we used to have picnics, when..." Griffiths pauses. "When there were five of us." Brought up as a Roman Catholic, he attended St. Bede's College before being accepted into Manchester University in 1952 to read English. After a brief involvement with professional football and a year in national service, he became a teacher. Griffiths, T. (2015) Scottish cinema-goers at war: The popular reception of British and Scottish films during the Second World War. In: Ugolini, W. and Pattinson, J. (eds.) Fighting for Britain? Negotiating Identities in Britain During the Second World War. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 137-160

He became chairman of the Manchester Left Club, and the editor of the Labour Party's Northern Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism, began writing plays, and was eventually commissioned by Tony Garnett to provide a script for The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964–70). The play, "The Love Maniac", was about a teacher, but even though Garnett took the commission with him when he moved to London Weekend Television and formed Kestrel Productions, it was never produced. [1] Griffiths, T. (2012) The Cinema and Cinema-going in Scotland, 1896 - C. 1950. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Books - Edited

That play generated a greater public response than any one-off piece in the history of British television, apart from Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home. The Daily Mirror alone received 1,800 letters after its broadcast. But Through the Night is simply not a work people remember Griffiths for, any more than Country (1981), a not wholly unsympathetic study of a Tory family on the eve of the 1945 Labour landslide, or Last Place on Earth, his epic TV drama about the race to the South Pole, broadcast in 1985. At one point the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen quotes a Norse poem: "Cattle die. Kings die. Even you will die. The one thing that does not die is judgment over the dead." And, in the case of a playwright, Griffiths might have added, judgment over the living.

Griffiths, of Ajax Avenue in Orford, Warrington, admitted attempting to engage in sexual activity with a boy between 13 and 15, failing to comply with notification requirements, possessing indecent images of children, possession of extreme pornography and three counts of making an indecent photograph of a child. She explained Griffiths is keen to engage with the probation service adding it is "certainly a fall from grace for a 61-year-old man with no previous convictions". The play soon brought him to the attention of Kenneth Tynan, the literary manager of the National Theatre who promptly commissioned Griffiths to write the play that became The Party. This critique of the British revolutionary left (featuring the National's artistic director Laurence Olivier in his last stage role as the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg) failed. A series of television plays, such as All Good Men (Play for Today, BBC, 31 January 1974) and Absolute Beginners (BBC, 19 April 1974, in the series Fall of Eagles), followed. He developed this further with his series about parliamentary democracy, Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), which was probably the summation of his dialectic technique.

Then Janice went into hospital again, after being on a waiting list for months. She had a lump in her breast that was getting bigger. First they gave her a large dose of pethidine [a fast-acting opiate]. Then they gave her the consent form. It basically said: 'We believe this to be non-malignant but whatever we now discover, you empower us to treat it as we see fit.' So she went in for a biopsy and woke up without a breast. That was such a trauma for her." Ms Wilde added that Griffiths was 'confused about his sexuality' to which the judge commented 'he's a little bit old for that' adding 'he's got 24 grandchildren'. He was chairman of the Manchester Left Club, and the editor of the Labour Party's Northern Voice newspaper. Gradually he tired of political journalism, began writing plays, and was eventually commissioned by Tony Garnett to provide a script for The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964–70). The play, "The Love Maniac", was about a teacher, but even though Garnett took the commission with him when he moved to London Weekend Television and formed Kestrel Productions, it was never produced. Buoyed by Garnett's enthusiasm and influenced by the Paris evenements of May 1968, he wrote Occupations, a stage play about Gramsci and the Fiat factory occupations of 1920s Italy. Ms Wilde explained that there was a "realistic prospect of rehabilitation" and asked the judge to consider the current impact of the pandemic on prisoners.