Charismatic actor best known for Boys from the Blackstuff
Alan Igbon
Born: May 29, 1952; Died: December 9, 2020.
ALAN Igbon, who has died of pneumonia aged 68, was an actor who made his mark on television with charismatic swagger. He achieved this latterly through a tenure, though short, on Coronation Street (2003), as Tony Stewart, the estranged father of regular character Jason Grimshaw.
Arguably, Igbon’s most significant appearance, however, came in Alan Bleasdale’s play, The Black Stuff (1980) and its seismic five-part sequel, Boys from the Blackstuff (1982). Charting the fortunes of a gang of Liverpool labourers on the dole, all but one of the plays was written prior to Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister. They nevertheless chimed with a rise in unemployment and a calculated ideological assault on working-class communities.
Igbon played “Loggo” Logmond, the cocksure cynic of the group, who works the system, even as he mouthily squares up to the authorities. Whilst Igbon appeared in all five episodes, Loggo’s personal travails weren’t shown individually, as other characters’ were. Michael Angelis as Chrissie Todd, Tom Georgeson as Dixie Dean and Bernard Hill as an iconic Yosser Hughes all received their own standalone episode. Igbon’s presence as Loggo nevertheless remained a key part of the collective dynamic that drove the series.
As Bleasdale told the Liverpool Echo in 2002 in an interview marking the programme’s 20th anniversary: “I thought Alan Igbon’s performance was so underrated. It wasn’t an easy part to play. Here was a character who could only get through his problems by putting a brick wall around himself. He was hurt and he was upset. But he didn’t want to articulate it. He was going to pretend nothing had happened. He would never show his true feelings.”
Igbon first came to prominence alongside Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels in Scum (1979). Alan Clarke’s big-screen version of Roy Minton’s script about the violent world of a young offenders’ institution had originally been made for BBC TV’S Play for Today strand two years earlier, but was withdrawn from the schedules following internal pressure due to its violent content.
In the film, Igbon played Meakin, a street-smart inmate who, like Loggo, works the system while continuing to question it. In one of the film’s key moments, Meakin launches an angry tirade after he learns that his best friend has killed himself in another prison. One of Scum’s most iconic images is of Igbon as Meakin, putting two fingers up to an institution about to explode around him.
Alan Olanrewaju Igbon was born in Hulme, the inner-city district of Manchester blighted by post-second World War planning decisions but which grew into a strong community and a ferment of local grassroots artistic activity.
Igbon’s mother Mary was Irish and his father Lawrence was Nigerian. Igbon grew up loving music and art and boxed in over 60 fights before training as an actor in London. Back in Manchester, he hung out at Moss Side’s multicultural Reno club.
As a black working-class actor in the 1970s, he found that work didn’t come easy, though he inspired other artists who followed in his wake. The former Brookside actor, Louis Emerick, and Moss Side-born musician and composer Barry Adamson paid tribute to him on Twitter upon news of his death.
Early stage work came at Liverpool Playhouse in the title role of a
Toxteth youth who believes himself to be a descendent of the famed sea captain in Philip Martin’s play, Nelson Lives in Liverpool 8 (1974).
Igbon’s early TV appearances included a brief first run in Coronation Street, in 1974, playing a soldier who helps fellow squaddie Martin find his mother, Bet Lynch, who had him adopted. Igbon returned to Weatherfield the following year to break the news to Bet that Martin had been killed in a car crash. In the Rovers’ Return he was engaged by the regulars in a conversation about war, religion and the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Igbon appeared in Crown Court (1975), and in a couple of episodes of sitcom Life Begins at Forty (1978). There was a small role in Alan Bennett’s TV play, Me! I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), and he appeared as a student in Willy Russell’s ITV Playhouse, Daughters of Albion (1979). He was a policeman in the mixed-race marriage comedy Mixed Blessings (1980), and had a role in Babylon (1980), Franco Rosso’s portrait of racial tension and police brutality against a reggae sound-system backdrop. He also appeared in an episode of The Professionals (1980).
Following Boys from the Blackstuff, he acted in three episodes of Channel 4’s first sitcom, No Problem! (1983). Scripted by Farrukh Dhondy and Mustapha Matura of the Black Theatre Co-operative, it was also the first TV comedy to focus on the black British community. He went on to star in The Front Line (1984-1985) as Sheldon, the Rastafarian halfbrother of Paul Barber’s policeman elder sibling.
Igbon worked with Bleasdale again, appearing in all seven episodes of GBH (1991) as Teddy, the ever-present factotum of Robert Lindsay’s crazed populist city council leader, Michael Murray. On stage, Igbon appeared at the
National Theatre and on tour in Bleasdale’s high-rise-set play, On the Ledge (1993).
On radio, he appeared in Monday (1993), Liverpool writer Jeff Young’s contribution to the serial The Crack, playing Eddie, aka Edward the Confessor, a petty thief with ambitions for something bigger.
He worked again with Angelis in the 2002 revival of Auf Wiedersehen Pet (2002), the Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais-scripted comedy drama about British construction workers, playing Addey, the bodyguard of crooked nightclub owner Mickey Startup.
His second stint in Coronation Street was his last regular role. As with everything else he appeared in, he inhabited his character with Manchester attitude aplenty.
He is survived by his partner, Sam, his son, Maximillian, his sister, Brenda, and his brother, Lawrence.