Alan Plater emerged as a writer in the early 1960s, when novelists and playwrights from the North of England, particularly those from the working class, were much in vogue, and he played his part in putting the distinctive flavour of the region on the literary map. But he became much more than a “northern” writer. Original plays with a personal touch for theatre and television, or episodes of series such as Z-Cars, went along with well-crafted adaptations from a catholic range of sources. He tackled Anthony Trollope, D. H. Lawrence and Agatha Christie with equal enthusiasm and facility.
He was not afraid of using his work to indulge his passions, notably jazz, and his tone was generally upbeat and positive. Jokes and witty wordplay would lighten the grimmer moments. In some ways he resembled his fellow Yorkshireman J. B. Priestley, whose novel The Good Companions he adapted for television.
Like Priestley he was hugely prolific, with more than 200 plays, episodes and novels to his name, and his output was never less than polished. But perhaps he lacked the edge of the great writer. With Priestley he could say that he was not a genius but possessed an abundance of talent. He also shared Priestley’s enjoyment of a good grumble, often against television bureaucracy that latterly obstructed his projects.
Looking back in 1977 on his then 25 years as a writer, he cited two principal influences. One was the American humorist James Thurber, “the only writer I set out consciously to imitate”. The other was the theatre director Joan Littlewood, who advised him that in the streets of Hull he could hear ordinary people talking poetry.
Although his work was seldom overtly political, and never preached, Plater was an unreconstructed socialist whose literary heroes included George Orwell, the historian E. P. Thompson and the Tyneside novelist Sid Chaplin. His views softened little over the years and he remained unshaken in his belief that the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and public schools was an essential first step towards a classless society.
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Alan Frederick Plater was born into a working-class family in Jarrow on Tyneside in 1935. His father, a blacksmith in the shipyards, lost his job in the Depression, moved to Hull when Alan was 3 and became a railwayman. Plater grew up in Hull, where he attended Pickering Road Junior School and Kingston High School. He then returned to the North East to King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne, to study architecture.
After failing his exams he qualified externally and for two years worked in an architect’s office in Hull. But he came to realise that it was not the sort of creative activity he was good at and that writing, which he had started at school, was his true métier. At least architecture taught him the importance of structure, which came in useful when he set out to become a full-time writer at the age of 25. After selling a play to BBC radio in Leeds he never looked back.
He established himself through his contributions to the ground-breaking police series Z-Cars, for which he wrote 18 episodes, and its spin-off series, Softly Softly. Another successful, though shorter-lived, series was The First Lady, in which Thora Hird played a battling councillor. There were also plays, such as A Smashing Day and the trilogy To See How Far It Is, and the musical Close the Coalhouse Door.
During the 1970s his BBC Play for Today, Land of Green Ginger, drew on his experiences of Hull and gave a first television role to Gwen Taylor, while in Trinity Tales he offered an exuberant update of Chaucer with the “pilgrims”, led by Bill Maynard and Francis Matthews, telling their tall stories on their way to a rugby league cup final.
Maynard also played the accident-prone handyman at the centre of a Plater sitcom, Oh No It’s Selwyn Froggit. Michael Bryant starred in Willow Cabins, a study of two outsiders who find an emotional rapport, and in Short Back and Sides, an angrier piece about a bungled city transport scheme.
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Plater started an extraordinarily busy 1980s with two ambitious adaptations. The Good Companions was a sympathetic rendering of Priestley’s picaresque story but even more impressive was The Barchester Chronicles, a tale of intrigue in cathedral cloisters fashioned from two Trollope novels that drew fine performances from Alan Rickman, Donald Pleasence and Nigel Hawthorne. There was also a series of dramabiographies. Pride of Our Alley charted the career of Gracie Fields, while On Your Way, Riley! dissected the marriage of Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley) and his domineering wife, Kitty McShane, played by Maureen Lipman. In Orwell on Jura Plater charted George Orwell’s last years and the writing of 1984, with Ronald Pickup as an uncanny lookalike.
The Beiderbecke Affair (1985) was Plater at his most playful, spinning a lighthearted thriller around the quest for a set of Bix Beiderbecke records. James Bolam and Barbara Flynn were aptly cast as the schoolteacher protagonists and the formula was successful enough to spawn two sequels.
Back in adapting mode, Plater made a fine job of Fortunes of War, based on Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies and featuring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as the newly-weds caught up in Hitler’s war far from home.
He followed it with A Very British Coup, from a novel by the MP Chris Mullin about a plot to undermine a left-wing prime minister, played by Ray McAnally. In between Plater wrote a couple of Sherlock Holmes episodes and a Miss Marple whodunnit and made a rare excursion into the cinema with Priest of Love, a film about D. H. Lawrence.
During the 1990s Plater became president of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and a fervent advocate for his craft. He publicly deplored what he called “a culture of timidity” in television drama, which he claimed was stifling writers. He had his own battle over Oliver’s Travels, accusing the BBC of imposing Alan Bates as leading man instead of his choice, Tom Courtenay, and other meddling. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the result was one of Plater’s lesser pieces.
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He turned to adaptation once more, and with happier results, on the BBC series featuring Reginald Hill’s chalk-and-cheese detectives, Dalziel and Pascoe. Plater and Malcolm Bradbury alternated as scriptwriters, each in his way bringing much-needed touches of humour to sombre scenarios. For the cinema Plater wrote the screenplay of George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It was a decent film in a low key.
In 2000, after an unusually long gap, he returned triumphantly to TV with The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a warm-hearted slice of nostalgia in which a saxophonist (Judi Dench) reunites her all-girl band from the Second World War. Dench, Joan Sims, in her final role, and Ian Holm as the transvestite drummer led a sparkling cast and the piece luxuriated in Forties tunes.
When after the death of John Thaw, the Inspector Morse series was reborn as Lewis, with the erstwhile sidekick in the central role, Plater became one of the regular writers. His contributions brought a typical wit and light touch to a sometimes pretentious project. His most recent screenplay, about murderous goings-on during a quiz weekend, was transmitted last month.
He continued to write for radio, and in a five-part series, Abandoned Projects (2005), he had fun recalling some of the surprising number of scripts that never made it into production. His final work, Maddison’s War, a two-hour original screenplay for ITV starring Kevin Whately and Robson Green and set in Newcastle during the Second World War, has just completed production.
Plater’s first marriage, to Shirley Johnson, was dissolved. In 1986 he married Shirley Rubinstein and he is survived by her, his three children from his first marriage, three stepsons and the 16 grandchildren he listed among his hobbies in Who’s Who. For his services to drama he was appointed CBE in 2005.
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Alan Plater, CBE, playwright and novelist, was born on April 15, 1935. He died of cancer on June 24, 2010, aged 75