liverpool writer jonathan harvey on canary, Corrie and his teenage acne

And I asked him how he managed to pack everything in to his day.
He told me: "I juggle quite well and then it all gets on top of me and I panic. I'm lucky, I don't have children or anything like that so if I need to work the weekend and stay up late I can at least do that and nobody is being too neglected."
There must have been a lot of staying up late to craft Canary, his new play spread over 50 years in the lives of its main characters, and which opens at the Playhouse in a fortnight.
I asked Jonathan if he'd always wanted to become a playwright, where the impetus had sprung from?
"I think I've always had a vivid imagination," he explained. "I was always quite good at English at primary school. I then wasn't very good at it at secondary school.
"I think I was a show off, and I wanted to be an actor and was in a youth theatre group in Allerton and we used to put on stuff at the Neptune and I loved that but, when I hit about 13-14, I got really bad acne and I didn't want people to look at me let alone pay money to.
But I had that showbiz bug if you like.
"And then I think it was just fortuitous that what then happened was when I was doing my A levels, the Playhouse ran a season in the studio of plays by local writers and it was £1 to get in if you were under 18."
Jonathan went along and waa hooked.
He said: "A family friend of ours, Jim Hitchmough, had a play on called Watching and that was the first one I saw and I loved it so much and it really made me laugh and it was set in Liverpool, it was really relevant, you were really close to the actors - I'd never seen anything like that before.
"I just started going and seeing the other shows in the season, one of which was Shamrocks and Crocodiles by Heidi Thomas, which was fantastic, that blew me away.
"And at the end of the season they ran a young writers festival and I was so excited by what had happened in that tiny space in the Playhouse studio that I thought I want to have a go and put a play on there.
"It was more time and place. It was the 80s, there was lots of exciting art stuff coming out of Liverpool -theatre, telly and film, and music and this just felt like an extension of that really.
"So I was lucky to be where I was at the time and to get that opportunity really.
it was a good grounding having that accessible theatre. Up to that point I'd loved theatre but it was all sort of The Wizard of Oz or Dial M for Murder and to suddenly see stuff that was relevant about your life was really inspiring."
So there you go. Now he's also writing the new stage version of Coronation Street which again is likely to cover almost 50 years.
Jonathan told me: " I've just chosen three themes because I think the worst thing you can do is just do it chronologically. People might leave at the interval!
"I'm still writing the real show as well so it's all systems go."
See my full chat with Jonathan in the arts pages of today's Echo.