FEW television characters lived so long in the mind as Yosser Hughes. The best remembered of the Boys from the Blackstuff, his "Gissa job" catchphrase was, at the same time, both a plea and a veiled threat.

Broadcast in 1982, the series captured the widespread horror and personal frustration of the seemingly inexorable rise in unemployment, then nudging two-and-a-half million and soon to reach the three million mark.

Following the halcyon days of the 1960s, when jobs were easy to come by for anyone who wanted one, unemployment had become a devastating blight on both the economy and society, obstinately refusing to disappear.

The ebbs and flows of the jobless total have run in time with the economic booms and recessions, but were always present.

But today is expected to mark a psychologically significant moment in the history of UK unemployment. Although still far from spelling its end, the number of people seeking work falls below one million for the first time in 26 years.

The last time unemployment was below one million, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister and the Queen was more than a year away from celebrating her Silver Jubilee.

And the intervening years have seen three more Prime Ministers come and go.

"What happened over that period was that we had a recession in 1975, in which unemployment started to take off, although, in retrospect, in a minor way," says Dr Martin Robson, economics lecturer at Durham University.

"But it was really the recession of the early 1980s when unemployment really did start to soar."

At its peak, one in eight of the male workforce was out of a job, with the number of claimants topping three million for the first time in September 1985, before a boom engineered by Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson saw the total start to fall.

But, by the middle of 1990, it was on the rise again as another recession hit, this time peaking at just under three million in December 1992 before starting a steady fall which has continued, more or less uninterrupted, ever since.

"What we have seen is a rise in unemployment during two major recessions, but, even during the late 1980s, it didn't come down to anything approaching the levels seen in the early to mid-1970s, which is what we have got now," says Dr Robson.

"Since that period, something has happened in the UK labour market which means we are able to sustain a lower rate of unemployment than we were in the late 1980s.

"It seems it is now possible to have a relatively low rate of unemployment, without triggering pressure for wage increases, which was a fundamental problem in the 1980s. This points towards the reduction in the level of trade union membership."

A second factor which has brought changes to the labour market, according to Dr Robson, is adjustments to the unemployment benefit system.

Indeed, this gave rise to a common complaint from the Labour opposition during the 1980s whenever unemployment fell. The only explanation, they said, was that the figures had been fiddled. Now, everybody is in on it and nobody seems to mind too much.

"There is much more pressure on the unemployed to search for work while they're claiming benefit than was the case ten or 15 years ago," says Dr Robson.

"And because people who are unemployed are out there searching for work more actively, firms find they are not experiencing the same kind of recruitment difficulties they might have done in a boom period ten or 15 years ago."

Official unemployment figures measure the number of claimants, but there are other views on how it should be assessed.

According to official figures, in January this year 1,004,000 people were claiming unemployment benefits, and so classed as unemployed. But, according to the International Labour Organisation, 1,564,000 people were actually unemployed, in the sense of being able to work but without a job.

And the use of training schemes to take people off unemployment benefits, but without giving them a permanent job, has also been seen as sharp practice among politicians keen to make out their policies are working.

"The Government's figures might indicate that unemployment is going below one million but a lot of that is to do with schemes and not real jobs," according to Bob Duffy.

Mr Duffy, co-ordinator of the Cleveland Trade Unionists and Unemployed Resource in Middlesbrough, sees many jobless people come through their doors to take part in training schemes. But many of them end up going back on the dole.

"There is a huge number of people on the New Deal scheme. It started out for the under-24s and now it is up to the 50-year-olds," he says.

"We have people coming in who have been out of work for 13 and 14 years, who have been on the statistics for a hell of a long time, and they're bringing them in for some sort of training.

"That might be a good thing but they're not training them for jobs that are available."

But if unemployment has seen its peaks and troughs, one constant has been the position of the North-East as one of the country's blackspots. The region has the highest claimant rate, of six per cent, against a national average of 3.5 per cent.

The gap had narrowed during the recession of the early 1990s, when unemployment in the South-East had risen rapidly, but the boom of the last few years has seen it re-emerge.

"It is still the case that it is areas like the North-East and Wales and, to a lesser degree, Scotland, that are not experiencing the same kind of reductions in unemployment as other areas," says Dr Robson.

And the difficulty in filling some vacancies, such as in teaching, nursing, and information technology, while one million people remain looking for work, points to a mismatch between those without jobs and those jobs on offer.

"It is inevitable that there are some people who will never get jobs," says Dr Robson. "The question is how severe that problem is."

The one million figure may be only symbolic, but it is still an important milestone for a Government committed to reducing unemployment, although there are signs the triumph may be short-lived.

"Clearly, a part of the explanation for falling unemployment it that we're in something of a boom period, and that has lasted quite a while," says Dr Robson.

"But the likelihood is that, given what is happening in the United States, we may be heading for some sort of recession in the next two or three years.

"You would expect some sort of increase in unemployment in that period. My feeling is that we won't get back to the kinds of levels we saw in the 1980s and early 1990s. But, before that, there might be some scope for further reductions, although I would not like to guess how low it could go."

While the days when the dole's reach meant "Gissa job" became a national catchphrase may be a thing of the past, no one is yet saying that unemployment has been vanquished.

"Governments can try and dampen the effects and make the economic cycle less pronounced," says Dr Robson. "But to some extent things are beyond their control. It would be wrong to say that we have seen an end to the economic cycle."