By Simon Thomson It’s grim up north. Especially in the 1980s. Boys from the Blackstuff is a play for anyone who is feeling nostalgic for the working-class misery of yester-year. First aired in 1980, as part of the BBC anthology series Play for Today, Alan Bleasdale’s The Blackstuff was a film about a group of Liverpudlian tarmac layers who become involved in a scam while working in Middlesbrough and consequently lose their jobs. Bleasdale followed up two years later, with a five-part series, Boys from the Blackstuff, which looked at how the characters from the original film were coping with li…