The Stage

Alan Plater

Published Tuesday 29 June 2010 at 13:29 by Michael Quinn

Alan Plater produced more than 200 television, theatre, film and radio scripts and six novels over the space of five decades to become one of the most prolific and consistently entertaining writers of his generation.

Born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear on April 15, 1935, he grew up and spent his adult life in Hull, qualifying as an architect before turning to writing. The Referees, his first television commission, for BBC North in 1961, revealed Plater’s signature blend of acutely crisp, class-conscious commentary, quirky humour gently bordering on the surreal, and a northern, urban setting. His follow-up, A Smashing Day, was described by one critic as having “the voice of Coronation Street with the spirit of Chekhov”.

His breakthrough came in 1963 with an invitation (which he later described as conferring on him “a Papal blessing”) to write for the ground-breaking Z-Cars, where his left-leaning politics cast a forensic eye on both sides of a police force coming to terms with modern, urban criminality. He wrote 18 episodes of the series and went on to write almost twice that number for its spin-off, Softly Softly.

Plater had an enviable gift for marrying quality with quantity. In 1965, he had 13 scripts televised, including The Incident, about a fictional wall built across England to prevent the unemployed mass of the deprived north from infiltrating the well to do south. It was, Plater recalled, “very strange and weird” and “one of my first overtly political plays”.

Politics was never far from the surface of Plater’s original work - which ranged from the Bill Maynard comedy vehicle Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt to The First Lady, in which Thora Hird played a crusading local councillor, and, more subtly, in The Beiderbecke Trilogy, which brought Plater’s love of jazz music to the fore.

A gifted adapter of other people’s work, Plater produced memorable scripts for television adaptations of The Stars Look Down, The Barchester Chronicles, The Good Companions, Fortunes of War and A Very British Coup. He was instrumental in bringing the well-received Flambards to television and latterly contributed to Dalziel and Pascoe, and Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis. His last work, Joe Maddison’s War, a period drama set in the north-east, has yet to be broadcast by ITV.

His theatre plays included Close the Coalhouse Door (later adapted for radio and television) and Peggy for You, based on the life of his former agent Peggy Ramsay, which was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award in 2001.

He was key in launching the Spring Street Theatre in Hull, now the home of the John Godber-led Hull Truck Theatre company, and his 1970 play Simon Says! was the first seen in the new Leeds Playhouse. More recently, he wrote a trilogy of community plays for Peter Maxwell Davies’ St Magnus Festival in the Orkneys and Sweet William for Northern Broadsides.

He received BAFTA’s Dennis Potter Award and a CBE for services to drama in 2005, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, of which he had been president from 1991-95.

He died from cancer on June 25 at the age of 75 and is survived by his first wife, his current wife and three children.