Peter Terson

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Peter Terson, born Peter Patterson, February 16th, 1932 in 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. Plays such as Zigger Zagger, about soccer 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. Ironically 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.

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. His romantic quest encounters a hard reality of barbed wire around stone circles, roads full of heavy vehicles criss-crossing the landscape, and people who care nothing for any notion of history or myth.

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.

He was a schoolteacher for 10 years before writing professionally.

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.