Alan Plater, 1935-2010

They don't make television writers like Alan Plater any more. He entered the profession when there was still an audience that could be relied upon to sit down in their millions and watch challenging drama from strands such as Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play. He made his name in that great academy of small-screen writing, Z Cars. Other than Dennis Potter, it's difficult to think of a writer who, though he also produced half a dozen novels and many stage plays including the memorable Peggy for You about the legendary theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, dedicated the greatest moments of a long career to television. Plater won the Dennis Potter Award in 2005, the same year as his CBE for services to drama. Joe Maddison's War, his final script, will be broadcast this autumn on ITV. In the meantime, enjoy these star-packed reminders of his sensitivity and range.

Although the gritty northern procedurals of Z Cars and Softly Softly, Task Force were Plater's first area of operation, he could also turn his hand to costume drama. It was Plater who adapted Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles in 1982. For perhaps the first time, the BBC deployed the lavish production values married to star casting to produce the kind of drama that would become a fixture in the schedules. Here is a clip from the opening episode.

A Very British Coup (1988), adapted from Chris Mullin's novel, was a gripping Thatcher-era moral conspiracy thriller in which the country's Far Left government is ousted by the forces of darkness.

Why should novelists write for the theatre? Plater must have enjoyed writing this scene from Selected Exits (1992), a dramatisation of the life of the Welsh novelist Gwyn Thomas starring Anthony Hopkins. Here Thomas is persuaded by the Royal Court to try his hand at playwriting.

And to prove that Plater didn't simply write about men, here is a scene from The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a delicious serving of bitter-sweet nostalgia in which Judi Dench looks back to her halcyon years as a young saxophonist in an all-girl swing band performing in London clubs during the Blitz.

• Find Alan Plater on Amazon
• Read Alan Plater, thinking aloud on theartsdesk
  
• Listen to Aleks Sierz's interview with Alan Plater on TheatreVoice