Irvine Welsh: Author seeks funding for planned TV series about gang duo Anthony and Christopher Donnelly

His novels have seen a variety of characters battle against the often cruel, brutality of their lives. Now Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh would like British television networks to show the same “kind of balls” as their American counterparts in producing hard-hitting dramas.

The Leith-born writer hopes to turn the real story of roughneck Manchester brothers Anthony and Christopher Donnelly into a multi-part television series. The novelist, whose debut 1993 novel shocked and thrilled readers and critics, told The Independent that British TV offered only a “limited” market for ambitious drama.

“We’ve got all these channels full of crap but we don’t have people putting in the kind of money that you want,” he said. “The thing which we tend to do best in Britain are the mini-series, a three- or four-parter. But what we are not really good at is doing the 10-part, 12-part stuff.”

Welsh, 57, and writing partner Dean Cavanagh, are working on Too Much Rock ‘N’ Roll, the provisional title for the TV drama based on the story of the Donnelly brothers, who grew up around Manchester’s most notorious crime family before going on to found the Gio-Goi clothing range and a fashion empire.

As former football ticket touts and promoters of warehouse parties, the Donnellys have lived life in Technicolor, with some of the big themes familiar to Welsh’s readers.

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“Anthony and Chris have touched on almost every aspect of British working-class culture. The whole Manchester scene is encapsulated in what they have done,” he said.

Welsh said he felt a common experience in learning to hustle for a living through the Thatcher years. In another era, as a “hard-working, diligent guy”, he might have become a “school teacher”, he said. “But I realised the whole system was shit and the way to get on was to scam and cheat and manipulate your way through the whole thing because that’s what everybody at the top was doing.”

Originally there was talk of turning the Donnellys’ autobiography Still Breathing into a feature film. But Welsh said cinema audiences have grown “wise to the rags and riches story” and a television series would allow the story and characters to be developed to their full potential.

His fear is that British television lacks the money and nerve to make top-end drama. He praised HBO for spending heavily on The Sopranos to showcase its future output. “They focused on a really great thing and they took off as a company from there. In the [commercial TV] world of Britain it needs somebody with those kind of balls to take these kinds of risks,” he said.

Welsh acknowledged that the BBC was “such a politically charged thing” that “they are going to be criticised for anything they do”, but said the broadcaster should be making more contemporary drama. “The BBC are in that very safe mode. Most of it is heritage pieces to sell to America. That’s the way they operate. They’re not really very good at contemporary cutting-edge stuff because they do worry about the risks involved.”

He praised the long-running Channel 4 series This is England and warned British broadcasters against thinking that youth culture and the Thatcher years had now been covered. “The Americans will say we have The Sopranos so then we can have The Wire and Ray Donovan, we can have variations of the same theme with a different impact or approach. In Britain they say ‘We’ve done this so we can’t do it again’,” he said.

“The Donnellys have had this larger-than-life thing right across music, fashion, football, gangsters. In This is England there are a bunch of low-key ordinary kids who are getting by, that’s the charm of it. The Donnellys is a very different high-octane story of ambition and refusal to give up,” he said.

The Donnelly brothers came from a family with ties to Manchester’s notorious Quality Street Gang; they grew up visiting scrapyards and meeting celebrities like George Best and Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott, who is said to have based The Boys Are Back In Town on the gang.

Well-known faces in the Hacienda club at the height of the “Madchester” scene, and on the football terraces and at acid parties, the Donnellys built what they call a “spider’s web” of contacts. “A lot of the people we schmoozed at the Hacienda are now CEOs of companies,” said Anthony.

After the demise of Gio-Goi, they founded clothing line Your Own (YO), which has been worn by Snoop Dogg and Idris Elba.

The brothers praised Welsh for having “absolutely got the truth of what we were talking about” in their autobiography.