Alan Plater, thinking aloud

The late writer on TV drama, music and politics

by Adam SweetingSaturday, 26 June 2010

Alan Plater's final drama for television, Joe Maddison's War, is due to be screened on ITV this autumn. Fittingly, it gave the Jarrow-born Plater the opportunity to revisit his background in the north-east. The story is set on Tyneside during World War Two, and reflects the impact of the war on a closely knit group of working-class families. The cast looks a little like Plater's own extended family, since it includes Geordieland stalwarts Robson Green, Kevin Whately and Trevor Fox (of the latter, the writer commented that "he was sent on this earth to do my stuff").

I interviewed Plater a few weeks ago for a newspaper article about Joe Maddison, but given his long and illustrious history, the conversation naturally drifted a little wider. He he had been ill for some time, but though his voice down the phone was a little faint, his recollections were sharp, his opinions clear-cut, and his enthusiasm for a bit of a yak enjoyably apparent. I wish I'd got to know him decades ago.

Plater on TV drama

I can't remember when I was last asked to write a new TV drama. I think it's because the television industry generally has got so locked into soap operas and talent shows. All the time now taken up by soap operas is taking up time and budget that used to belong to drama - what I call proper drama, the kind of things that Jack Rosenthal and Dennis Potter used to write. The paradox is that when they do a single drama like Housewife, 49 with Victoria Wood, they get good audiences. The one John Thaw did, Goodnight Mister Tom, got a huge audience, and it got a huge audience when they repeated it. So the audience is there.

Plater on politics

Yes, I guess my work's political. Why deny it? Yes, I'm an old-fashioned socialist, which is a pretty lonely thing to be these days. When I wrote A Very British Coup [1988, adapted from Chris Mullin's novel] it had to be highly political because the book on which it's based is highly political. I had to write about the possibility of the election of a left-wing Labour prime minister, and I was writing it at the height of Thatcherism. The notion that we'd ever have another Labour prime minister seemed totally out of the question.

Harry Perkins [the central character played by Ray McAnally] was an old-fashioned lefty of the kind that only exists, I'm afraid, in our imaginations. The English working class in a very broad sense is actually very conservative with a small c, and it's a reality that old lefties don't like to acknowledge. I was a member of the Labour party from about age 20, until we invaded Iraq, and I resigned over Iraq.

Plater on writing

I think there's a big difference between TV and theatre. In the theatre you persuade the audience that you're all going to this land of "let's pretend", and you have a great adventure, and at the end you stop pretending and you say, "That was rather good, wasn't it?" But TV's much more realistic. You have to convince the audience that this is what it was like on that day in 1941, and here is the very woman who was working in the chip shop the day the chips went up from tuppence to threepence.

Plater on jazz

I listen to all kinds of stuff, but I think jazz probably leads the way. Duke Ellington said there's only two types of music, good and bad, and there's good jazz and bad jazz and good and bad everything else. Thomas Beecham said the British don't like music, they just like the sound it makes. I think a lot of people like the sound that jazz makes without realising that's what they're listening to.