Mother's Day writer Nick Leather: 'It would be wrong if the story of the Warrington bombing and the Parrys wasn't told'

Nick grew up in Newton and he was on his way to Warrington with his dad Neville to buy a Mother’s Day present for his mum Judith when he heard about the IRA attack on the car radio.

He was just 15 at the time and thinks of it as the week he grew up and saw the world in a completely different way.

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Nick said: “Everyone I knew was either in Warrington, around Warrington or on their way to Warrington that day. I was on my way to the town with my dad. We were three miles away in Winwick Road and then on the car radio it said there had been a major incident in Warrington and the town centre was closed.

Nick Leather

“My dad said: ‘Not again. They can’t have done it again’, referring to the gasworks bomb a few weeks before on Winwick Road.

“It felt absurd at the time that Warrington could be targeted and caught up in something that felt so remote.

“When you’re a kid and you watch the news it’s not that different from watching drama in that you watch it, you can even be affected by it, but it’s a different world.

“Yet something suddenly happened that was not a different world.

“It was your world.

“Something from the telly had invaded your world and then you could never watch the news in the same way again.

Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball lost their lives in the IRA attack. The drama focuses on Tim's parents' response to losing their child

“Because when you watched Wendy and Colin Parry that week and saw what they went through as Tim fought for his life from then on when you watched the news you knew everyone was going through that.

“It wasn’t something removed. Everyone was feeling that and suddenly it became a different thing.

“So I look at it and think: ‘It’s the week I grew up’.

“Even at the screening of Mother’s Day at the Peace Centre just last week I was talking to people about it afterwards and everyone was saying things like: ‘I was in the library or I was in Golden Square and heard it’.

“I think it changed everything.

“Twenty-five years passes but for lots of people it’s still very close.

“I used to go in JJB Sports in Bridge Street all the time trying to work out when I could afford the Everton kit.

“When the bomb went off Tim was on his way out of the same store having been in to buy a pair of Everton shorts.

“When you think of things like that it couldn’t make more of an impact on you.”

Nick got the chance to pitch his idea for Mother’s Day to the BBC after doing a another factual drama called Murdered For Being Different.

It was about 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster who was kicked to death in a park by a gang because she and her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, were dressed as goths.

Murdered For Being Different

Nick added: “It had gone down well at the BBC so they asked if there was another factual drama I wanted to pitch.

“I said: ‘There is only one, I’ve got a personal connection to it and I’m desperate for it to be told’.

“So I pitched it and I think what helped was that it was approaching the 25th anniversary of the bomb.

“I was very invested in Murdered For Being Different. It was a profound thing to work on and with Mother’s Day they knew I was from the Warrington area and how passionate I was about it.”

Nick told Weekend that he thought Colin and Wendy Parry’s response to the bombing and the loss of Tim was ‘astonishing’.

But then he had to consider whether ‘poking the family’s wounds’ by dredging it up on telly was the right thing to do.

Nick said: “My friends and I used to hang around Warrington in the early 90s. It’s part of who I am and you want to honour that for anyone who’s from around here or knew it then.

“I remember Tim’s sister Abbi thinking about their story being turned into a drama and saying: ‘You are going to be poking our wounds’.

“I remember that sticking in my head and haunting me a bit because it was true.

“That’s what we were going to be doing – but what it comes back to is the same reason they’ve kept the story alive themselves. You’re writing about the worst thing that’s ever happened to somebody so you have to think a lot about whether you’re justified in doing that.

“To me the answer that always came back was it wasn’t just justified, it would be wrong not to tell it. It’s wrong that it has taken 25 years to tell it.”

But when Nick first pitched the idea a lot of the people he spoke to hadn’t heard about the bomb.

“I found that amazing,” he added.

“Maybe it’s being from the area but it made me more passionate about it.

“What happened was part of our normal lives and routine and it could have been anyone. This ordinary family just by some freak chance were caught up in it and then their life was shattered and could never be the same.

“How they somehow had the dignity and goodness inside them to then devote their lives into turning that into something positive. That’s just astonishing to me.

“Even when something so terrible happens the fact that hope can come out of it I think is a tremendous thing.

“I want people to look back at it in that way. It’s like Colin said at Tim’s funeral: ‘If my son can become a symbol of peace then that will be his unique achievement’.

Daniel Mays as Colin and Anna Maxwell Martin as Wendy

“It ended up being true. Warrington was one of the clear turning points in the Troubles.”

Nick found his love for writing after doing work experience at Warrington Guardian’s former sister paper the Newton Guardian.

He then won a young playwright competition at the Royal Exchange Theatre and ended up being their writer in residence for a year.

He said: “That was amazing for me because it was like a youth training scheme for playwriting.

“It was the sort of thing that I didn’t think existed. I got to see how the theatre works, sit in on rehearsals and watch every department and then workshop scenes for the actors.”

At the end of that year he had a play at The Exchange called All The Ordinary Angels. Then he worked with other theatres like Everyman and did radio plays before getting his break writing for Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On.

Nick added: “I never really thought that you could make a living writing for telly and that’s why I was interested in journalism at first.

“It seemed more of a ‘proper job’. I think the drama side is my strength but that’s why it has been interesting doing factual drama recently because it’s almost combining the two.”

• Mother's Day is on BBC Two at 9pm tonight, Monday