JOURNALIST turned playwright Dave Windass has called on his days in the fourth estate for his latest play for Hull Truck Theatre, On A Shout.

"I was working on the Holderness Advertiser when, seven years ago, I went down to Spurn Point to write a feature.

The point seems to get narrower every time you go down there, and the road keeps moving further to the side. It's very strange, " Dave says.

"Like a lot of Hull youngsters, I used to go to Spurn Point at the weekend, with the North Sea on one side and the Humber on the other, and lots of birdwatchers? but not a lot of fun, except for cockle pickers.

"But I've been going back there since then as an adult, and Spurn Point was one of the options that came up for a play, and when we tried to lock it down into something that would make a drama, the lifeboat crew became the inevitable thing to write about."

Why?

"They are heroes, aren't they?

They're the only full-time lifeboat crew in the country but because of where Spurn Point is, it's a very precarious position with the Humber there and lots of traffic on the North Sea."

Initially through his journalism, Dave built up a relationship with the lifeboat crew and their families, which in turn has led to the "storming comic drama" of On A Shout (the expression that describes when crew members respond to a call to take to the sea).

"The first meeting with them was seven years ago, and then I went back 18 months ago to talk about it more seriously for the play and obviously there were some things, some experiences, they don't want to talk about, " Dave says.

"The first couple of times I turned up in journalistic mode with a notebook to talk to them in the operations room, where they sit and relax, and I asked what I thought were the simplest questions, like what it was like when someone died on a shout, and that was met with a silence that almost ended the play before it had begun.

"But then they opened up to tell me how they might reach out for a body and there'd only be an arm there."

Dave went out on a couple of exercises on the Pride of Humber lifeboat for research purposes.

"They put it through its paces, showing off what the boat could do, and after only five minutes I was turning a shade of green and they were thinking 'what a wuss' - and that was on a calm day, as flat as a pancake."

Seven lifeboat families live at Spurn Point: crew, wives and their families. "Being a lifeboat man is one of those things that passes down families; a father and son working together, and they're reallife heroes, " says Dave.

"When you think of heroes, you think of action heroes with muscles and eagle eyes, but the more I spoke to them, the more I realised they were real people with real lives going on, and it becomes more complex. It just seemed to lend itself to a real, romping play."

For research, Dave "pretty much read everything there was".

"But then I threw it out the window and let my imagination run, setting the play on George's last day at sea, close to retirement and looking back on his life in the RNLI, in which his grandfather, father and brother all served, " he says.

"Fingers crossed, it's a rollercoaster ride, though hopefully it's different from my last play, Sully, in that it's an epic piece that covers 60 years, all fiction but loosely based on reality."

  • On A Shout, Hull Truck Theatre, at sea until February 16. Box office: 01482 323638.