Joe Tucker talks to Steven Parissien

Television scriptwriter Joe Tucker tells the story of his uncle, Eric Tucker, a shambolically dressed man who lived with his mother for nearly 80 years and amassed 500 of his own paintings without anyone realising the scope and quality of his ambition.

Eric Tucker’s life consisted of performing comedy routines in working men’s clubs and daily trips to the bookies. Towards the end of his life, he requested an exhibition of his paintings. Joe Tucker says the family found hundreds of paintings of street scenes, circus and theatre performers, and busy pubs. They began to ask why this highly sociable man had never left his mother, whether he had ever experienced love when he painted it so beautifully, and what drove him to create so much but share it so rarely? In a touching, funny and thoughtful investigation of the nature of expression, the ownership of art and the secret life of those nearest to us, Tucker takes us into his uncle’s extraordinary and compelling world.

‘An artist virtually unknown until his death in 2018 but since compared to L.S. Lowry’ Guardian

Tucker is a scriptwriter. With his writing partner, Lloyd Woolf, he has created and written the BBC shows Witless, Click & Collect and Black Ops. Here he talks to architectural and cultural historian Dr Steven Parissien.