Peter Terson

Who is Peter Terson?

Peter Terson 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. He was born as Peter Patterson. From 1956 - 1958 Peter was trained at Redland Teacher Training College in Bristol, a college of Bristol University. He taught for 10 years before writing professionally. He taught at what was then Blackminster County Secondary School, near Littleton, Worcestershire. He taught history and P.E. Peter 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.