Blues fans' new play reveals the funny side of Everton's history

A new play, written by two massive Blues fans, reveals some of the funniest episodes in Everton’s history.

On The Banks Of The Royal Blue Mersey has been penned by local writers Paul Daley and Steve Bird, friends and both Everton season ticket holders.

With the club now into its final season at Goodison Park, they wanted to commemorate the move to Bramley Moore by taking a tongue-in-cheek look at incidents (and maybe a few urban myths) which have happened over the 136 years since it was founded.

“There’s been a lot of things written about Everton over the years so we wanted to look at it from a different angle and write it more as a comedy because, to be honest, you can’t take it too seriously,” says Paul.

Writers Paul Daley and Steve Bird with director Lee Clotworthy. Credit: On The Banks Of The Royal Blue Mersey

“Everton being Everton, we could have written a three-hour play just about the last six months, there’s plenty of material, but we decided that was a different story so this tries to cover the whole history from the beginning to now, putting a comedy slant on it all.

“A lot of the things that have happened have been silly, you couldn’t make them up, and that’s what we’ve tried to focus on. It’s the funny things people have enjoyed over the years about supporting Everton.

“It’s written in the style of Horrible Histories, with a touch of Monty Python, so although it tells the history of Everton it’s not serious at all. But it’s all done in a very affectionate way, because we love the club and everything about it.”

Having well over a century to go at meant Paul and Steve weren’t short of memories to include in a series of sketches.

Credit: On The Banks Of The Royal Blue Mersey

In fact, one of their favourites – about Myra the dog who features on some of the posters for the play – didn’t even make the final cut.

“That happened at the end last season when we played Chelsea at Goodison,” says Paul. “Outside the ground when the coaches were arriving, somebody who lived around there was walking their dog at 2pm on the Saturday.

“There were thousands of fans there on Goodison Road, they were setting off flares and the dog couldn’t get through so everybody picked it up and it got crowd-surfed through! It was like the parting of the Blue sea with everyone worshipping this dog that saved Everton!

“We loved that story but in the end Myra isn’t included in the play. We had so much we could have put in, it would have been like War and Peace, so we had to be really selective about what we kept in and what we took out.”

Paul’s previous Blues play, The Bitters, was more about the frustration of an Evertonian over the recent lack of trophies.

This one, he says, is more of a celebration of fans’ unshakeable devotion even when things aren’t going the team’s way.

“Someone said to me ‘are you a fan?’ but I think it goes beyond that, it’s your heritage. All my family are Evertonians and now I take my grandkids to the match and they’d sooner watch Everton draw nil-nil than see Liverpool win trophies.

“On The Banks Of The Royal Blue Mersey is about saying, ‘OK, we didn’t win anything but we had a good laugh getting there.

“You can knock us down but somehow, despite everything, we’re still here and we always have that hope’.”

On The Banks Of The Royal Blue Mersey is at Hope Street Theatre from November 6-9.