Alan Plater (photo: Craig Leng)
Back to his roots
Anne Hogben interviews Alan Plater
Early in Spring 2009 Alan Plater got a phone call from ITV asking him if he would be up for writing a one-off original drama with a central role for Kevin Whately. They were thinking of a story set on Tyneside during the Second World War about the Home Guard.
Plater's response was 'You've just walked into my life!' This was his family's history through another door. 'I spent some time on Tyneside during the war; my uncle Harry was in the Home Guard so I've got all his stories to draw on.' Indeed, as a boy, Plater can remember the experience of being bombed while on Tyneside.
'Frankly, I never thought it would be made. It's going to be a bit expensive; above the average budget for a 90-minute television drama. That 1941-43 wartime period has to be re-created and that means finding authentic-looking streets, shops and so on. It's about three guys working in a shipyard. And all the shipyards have gone. You can cheat of course but it still costs a lot. A provisional budget was drawn up that nearly made me faint in horror! Then there was a very long silence. I thought they'd given up on the idea. Then, come October, I got a message from the office asking me to help prepare a press release on Joe Maddison's War. It's going ahead. It's so exciting.'
Whately and Robson Green are to play the two leads. The entire shoot will take place in Newcastle.
'Patrick Collerton, the director, is a local; he lives there most of the time anyway. He is the son of Alec Collerton, someone I was a student with in Newcastle; we studied architecture together. We were good friends. It was Alec Collerton who first lent me some Gerry Mulligan LPs. 'Listen to this' he said. 'You'd like this.'
'Everyone knows each other up there. I've been told you could cast this thing six times over with local talent.'
'It's the first major piece of original drama for television I've written since The Last Of The Blonde Bombshells 10 years ago, in 2000. Since then BBC TV has totally lost interest in me. They’ve written me off. I must be too old.'
Plater credits this comeback to Whately. He'd had reservations about the idea of a spin-off series on the back of Inspector Morse. The pilot episode of Lewis went out in February 2007 and it pulled in 11 million viewers. Plater was asked to write the next episode. And then another.
He has now written four episodes of the Lewis series. Three have been broadcast and the next one, The Sudden Death Question, is in the can. He has just been commissioned to do a fifth. First dozen pages on the laptop already. At 74 going on 75, he is amused to find himself writing cop shows again.
'The great thing about the cop show is that it's like the western. You can use it for anything you like in the world. They are little morality tales or whatever you want. I have a couple of advantages with Lewis. One is, I'd never written for Morse. I was invited one time but wasn't available. And secondly, I didn't really know Oxford. It was great fun going up there and nosing around to find out what had not already been seen or been used dramatically. The other thing about Morse was that most of the stories were about dons, or middle-class and middle-aged people. Nobody had written much about the students. Most of my first three stories have been largely been about the students. Crime in the student community, or relating to the student community in some way. I think it gave my episodes a sort of freshness. We also get these bright young actors straight out of drama school, or still in drama school. They are terrific. They really do light up the screen. They are bright, clever, thoughtful, young and hard-working actors.'
'I'd thought my television career was over, to be honest, and didn’t care much. The way television is going it wouldn’t have broken my heart. I still have theatre. Plenty to be getting on with.'
He is dismissive about the notion that only young people can write about young people. 'Anybody can write about anything, I believe. Nobody said to me these students I created in Lewis are not like real students. I have grandchildren who are students. This gives me a way in to the student mentality which is remarkably conventional. Not that much different to my day, with some new expressions like, 'I'm gonna chill'. That's about me using my ears and writing down what I hear.'
'It's about listening. And writing it down. If you stop listening and you lose that curiosity about the way people speak and the way people behave, then you stop being a proper writer. I am constantly coming across little tales in the paper or in life. You put them away in the bank for later. Eventually they will turn up, by which time you forgot where you found them to begin with.'
'In the past few years the health has not been too terrific but the writing has given me a focus. Given a choice between physical problems and being stuck in a room with a laptop and mental problems... well, what's the point of being able to gallop around the world if you can't spell your own name? I am nearly 75 years old. Body starts to fall apart anyway unless you are a phenomenon to the human race.'
'Shirley and I had a big joint 70th birthday party a few years ago. We made threescore years and ten. We smoke, we still drank a bit then. Everything else is a bonus. I am quite biblical that way.'
'All this illness coincided with, by my standards, a huge range of activity in the theatre. There was a period last year when I had three shows in production. Blond Bombshells Of 1943 (the prequel to the TV drama, this time with a young cast, set in 1943). It's now done five tours, including a tour of dinner theatre in Raffles Hotel Singapore. Dinner theatre wouldn't be anyone's first preference but the young cast get to stay in five-star hotels and see the world. Derek Nimmo started this a few years ago doing dinner theatre out in the Far East to an audience of ex-pats. So Bombshells is on the road. I also did a jazz musical with Alan Barnes and that went on in Newcastle and Bolton. And we revised my whole City Play at Hull Truck.'
'People like Bombshells because it's fun. People are not going to be gruelled. I write the kind of show that I would like to go to see. Nothing complicated about it but there is nothing like the power of laughter and the joy released that the theatre can give you. I think that Lee Hall does better than anyone around at the moment. Both with Billy Elliot and The Pitman Painters.'
He marvels at the original Geordie cast of the Pitman Painters taking the play to Broadway in the autumn and wonders if New Yorkers will need sub-titles or some kind of glossary. He says that back in the 1930s some learned academic predicted that, due to the influence of the wireless, all regional accents would disappear within two generations. 'But he couldn't have been more wrong. Regional accents are the same now as they were in the 30s. The influence of the wireless and later television is there. They are still using the same accents but integrating street talk from down here [in London]. In Newcastle they might say something like 'I'm goanna go chill, man.'
'It’s a wonderfully complicated thing, the whole business of spoken English. It's my living of course and it's a matter of pride that I have written things in all kinds of local accents'. In recent years he has written community plays in Orkney where the local accent fascinates him. 'It's not Scottish, but English with a powerful Scandinavian element.'
'I try to pick up the music of the way people speak. I never try to produce phonetically. It's in the order they put the words. I find doing that more fascinating than plot.'
'I find doing the plot the most tedious thing about writing TV drama. The formula is, relatively speaking, unchanging. You have a murder. You have a line-up of suspects; one by one. The one that you think is the hot favourite is probably the next victim. It’s a mechanical thing, which actually I am not that good at. What I am good at is the little scenes between people. The back-chat between the two cops; I love writing that. I could do it for hours, Lewis and Hathaway in the car. It's the same thing I did in Z Cars all those years ago. It's Z Cars in suits. That's what I like doing most. I think that's what the audience enjoys most too. Those little moments. If you ask people to describe the plot of an Inspector Morse episode they would find it very difficult. When you ask people what they like about it it's always the little moments. When he bollocks Lewis for getting the beer wrong. But not the plots. It can be a bit of an uphill task persuading the front office to see things my way though.'
'Writing soaps is different. That's why I can't write for them. They have to be plot driven. They have to be worked out on a six-month basis. I couldn't get my head round that sort of thing and thank God I don't have to. I think soaps were just about bearable when it was twice a week. People like Jack Rosenthal could do it then. But now it's three, four or five times a week. It's a sausage machine.'
He has a theory about Kevin Whately. He recalls writing an episode of Miss Marple with Joan Higson called A Murder Is Announced (1985). Whately played the sergeant's sidekick and he reckons it must have been his first time on screen as a policeman. Sometimes an actor will thank him for giving him some good lines to say.
'I try to give actors things to say that they will love saying which sounds pretty elementary but I listen to some of the lines actors have to say and think, ‘That's a bit of a mouthful,’ and wonder would anyone actually speak that way? I hear the words in my head when I write but I don't speak them aloud. My strength is my ears. I think I hear the way people speak and I am good at putting it down on paper and leaving out the bits we don't need. I love minimalism'.
'I did a play in Newcastle in 1990 called Going Home. There was a particular moment when the actor got a round of applause for two words. His wife is saying to him, 'Did I ever tell you that you are a wonderful human being?’ The man looks around and pauses a bit and then says, ‘Thank you’. Those two words brought the house down every night. But a three-page soliloquy, oh for heaven's sake, shut up, I get the drift; you are unhappy or in love. I hate people talking about their emotions! Show, don't tell. Show the audience!'
'I love gentleness. Jack Rosenthal's plays were all so gentle, but never sentimental. His people are not happy and he tries to somehow examine the gap between the way they are and the happiness that eludes them.'
When he first got ill, a few years ago, Plater got a message from Anthony Minghella that he still treasures. 'We need for you to tell us what to feel and how to think. Ant.' Minghella had been a student of his at the University of Hull and was asked to stay on and teach. 'He was a beautiful human being with genuine charm. He got on with everyone because in his eyes everyone had equal value. Everyone counts. The same way that in his plays Arthur Miller is telling everyone in the audience, 'Everyone counts. Therefore you count.'
Plater's own career started out as a writer for a student magazine. He says he wrote 'six lousy plays'. Later Alfred Bradley, a radio producer famous for talent-spotting, took an interest in his work and a few of his plays were eventually broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Bradley passed him on to Vivien Daniels, a TV producer in Manchester, who encouraged him to try again and eventually picked him to do an episode of Z Cars.
'John Hopkins was script editor and lead writer on Z Cars. He'd say 'Write a page of what you think it'll be like.' He ended up doing 18 episodes. 'No endless rewrites in those days. We had to do rewrites in long hand and then telephone them through to a script editor in the office who took it down in shorthand and the typing pool would do it. In those days re-writes had a charge. Now I have to do the rewrites. The charge is on me. It's in this way that the computer is a curse. It gives people a licence not to make up their mind and ask for more and more rewrites because it doesn't cost them anything. We used to have a rehearsal time when problems could be sorted out.'
It was while writing for Z-Cars in 1963 that Allan Prior asked him, 'Are you in the Guild?' He joined up at once. A few years later Dick Sharples persuaded him to join the TV Committee where he put in his time in negotiations before becoming Chair and President. One of the things he helped to achieve in the mid 90's was the merger with the Theatre Writers' Union.
His first agent was the legendary Peggy Ramsay, a true Bohemian, who cared only about Art and thought only vulgar people talked about money. Her protégeé is now earning more money from his writing than at any time in his career, from substantial new television commissions and performances of his plays in theatres in the UK and abroad. And, even more so, from the 'long tail' of sales on his early TV shows. The long hours he spent haggling around negotiation tables on behalf of the Writers' Guild has meant that he, and many other writers, are now sharing in the profits made by the scripts they wrote 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
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