When the self-styled 'Greatest' came to the North East
Playwright Ishy Din explains the background to his new play
Ishy Din was a youngster in 1977 when Muhammad Ali, boxer and international superstar, visited Tyneside, hot on the heels of the late Queen in her Silver Jubilee year and US President Jimmy Carter a few months previously.
More people in South Shields turned out to see the heavyweight champ than to see the Queen, Ishy discovered while researching Ali’s headline-making visit.
As someone told a journalist at the time: “Well, the Queen’s going everywhere, isn’t she? She has to. But Ali’s come here for us.”
Ali’s visit, engineered by South Tyneside ex-boxer Johnny Walker, really was extraordinary.
He was treated like royalty with speeches and a civic reception. Unlike the Queen, he also entered the ring for some exhibition bouts and had his marriage vows blessed at a mosque in South Shields.
Growing up in Middlesbrough, Ishy was aware of Ali’s visit. He’d seen him on the Parkinson show in the days when everyone watched TV and mostly the same things at the same time.
He was tickled to discover that the man whose fighter’s mantra was to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” landed not at Newcastle Airport with its waiting dignitaries but at Teesside, owing to some delay.
“He’s always been a hero of mine,” he insists.
“We share a birthday, January 17. Any sort of connection with Muhammad Ali is something I’m incredibly proud of.”
Ishy’s mentioning it now because, in his fifties, he’s an established playwright and his new play, Champion, recalling the visit, is to premiere at Live Theatre.
“Oh,” he thought, when invited to write a play for Live, “this is my opportunity to delve into this story I’ve been holding on to for so long. I decided to go for it.”
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He threw himself into the research, heading first for South Shields.
“You’ve got to be a bit of an investigator,” he explains. “Digging into a story, you go from one thing to another, so I went from the museum to the archives to South Shields Local History Group.
“I got contacts within the Yemeni community in South Tyneside and went there.
“It was a building of testimony, of experience, where you’re just trying to glean things. You’ve got to be a magpie, picking the things you think will serve your purposes as a dramatist.”
In the end, the goal was fiction rather than documentary, and one puzzle was how to “get under the skin of the story… how to relay that experience of Ali’s visit and what he meant to swathes of the population, regardless of race and background?”
Ishy thought about his charisma and obviously his boxing ability, and also his activism. His views on race and religion were eloquently expressed but not always greeted with universal approval.
“Few of Parkinson’s interviewees were as politically charged as Ali who was so resolute about what he stood for.”
While Ali is very much a presence in his play, Ishy says he doesn’t actually appear, which would seem to sidestep a casting headache. Who could possibly play him?
Instead the Ali visit will be seen from the perspective of a mixed-race family in South Shields in what Ishy calls a story about identity and belonging.
“It’s one of the big questions of our time. Who are we? Where do we belong? I think we’re all grappling with that. It interested me how people are still trying to find their place in the world.”
The on-stage characters are Sheila (Christina Berriman Dawson), an Englishwoman who married a Pakistani man, and their teenage sons, Ali-worshipping Bilal (Jack Robertson), who goes by the anglicised ‘Billy’, and the younger Azeem (Daniel Zareie), not into sport and with darker skin.
Of the issues raised, Ishy can claim to be writing with an authority that transcends research.
“I think any playwright, if you ask about their characters, will tell you there’s a bit of them in each one.
“You’re trying to give an insight into the human condition and the easiest reference point is your own lived experience – so there’s a bit of my soul in each of these characters.”
That could certainly be said of his last play performed at Live Theatre, Approaching Empty, with its cast of taxi drivers.
This was Ishy’s realm ahead of the real-life plot twist that would transform a Middlesbrough cabbie into a playwright who is also currently writing a play about the fall of the Mughal Empire for the Royal Shakespeare Company and was recently appointed associate playwright of London’s Royal Court Theatre.
It’s all down to serendipity, he says. Some 20 years ago he’d paid a lot of money to buy his two young daughters (there are three now) a computer, “the first in the Din household”, and was annoyed that they didn’t use it much.
“Different times then,” he says as we both laugh at the idea of a parent bemoaning his children’s lack of screen time.
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One night in his cab he heard a Radio 5 Live call-out for short sporting-themed radio plays. “I thought, I’ll use that newfangled machine to enter this competition.”
He sent off a script about two Pakistani kids going to watch Middlesbrough FC, “absolutely convinced that someone is going to put this in the bin.
“Four weeks later I got this fantastic phone call from someone saying they loved it. There’d been something like 1,500 entries and they were going to make 10 of them, including mine.”
For a man who had tried his hand at many things, only to fall back time and again on the taxis, it was a lightbulb moment. “It was like, ‘What if this is the thing I can do?’”
Clearly it was. Validation from the BBC was followed by other early successes and suddenly he was energised, looking for competitions to enter and writing opportunities.

Thanks to his cab years and his magpie mind, ideas were never a problem.
Passengers had unwittingly sowed the seed of his play about rival darts teams and the one about a supermarket employee who senses a kindred spirit while gathering items ticked on an online shopping list.
“It’s one of the big questions of our time. Who are we? Where do we belong? I think we’re all grappling with that. It interested me how people are still trying to find their place in the world.”
Ishy Din, writer of Champion
And now, as well as writing, Ishy strives through his Latitude project to smooth the path for kids coming along behind, offering practical film-making courses in schools.
Over 12 weeks pupils learn from professionals about camerawork, lighting, sound and suchlike, the process beginning with a script and ending with a red carpet premiere.
He likens it to the days when kids learned woodwork and metalwork to prepare them for jobs in industry, pointing out that film studios are more likely sources of employment nowadays than factories or shipyards.
“I was in my mid-30s before I realised I was allowed to be a writer,” he says. There’s no stopping him now.
Champion opens on February 13 and runs until March 8. And as an appetiser, North East former boxing champion and commentator Glenn McCrory, who met Ali, will be in conversation at Live Theatre on February 8. Find tickets and info on the Live Theatre website.
Meanwhile those with memories and memorabilia of The Greatest’s 1977 Tyneside stay are being encouraged to share them ahead of the play’s premiere. Find out more here.