Peter Terson

Peter Terson (born Peter Patterson; 16 February 1932 – 8 April 2021 ) was a British playwright whose plays have been produced for stage, television and radio. Most of his theatre work was first produced at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent in conjunction with director Peter Cheeseman, who championed his work and directed over twenty of his plays.

Terson was born in Walker, From 1956 to 1958, he trained at Redland Teacher Training College in Bristol, a college of Bristol University. He taught for 10 years before writing professionally. He taught History and P.E. at what was then Blackminster County Secondary School, near Littleton, Worcestershire. Terson left Blackminster in the mid-1960s.

Plays such as Zigger Zagger, about football 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. 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.

Hans Neuenfels' Heidelberg-production of Zikke Zakke was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in 1969.

Works for television often took a more optimistic view, especially a trilogy of Plays for Today centring on a trio of Yorkshiremen, led by Art (Brian Glover), and their humorous misadventures. 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.