David Kynaston recently released the latest volume of his epic history of post-war Britain. A Northern Wind covers 1962 to 1965, so naturally I skipped to the index to see if Plater gets a mention. I was primed to expect it, because he’s already been referenced a couple of times in the preceding Modernity Britain volume, which deals with the period between 1959 and 1962; firstly, in relation to his thoughts, as a newly-practising architect, about new developments in housing-estate design, and, secondly, among a list of creative and political ‘meritocrats’ who had benefited from the grammar-school system.
But whilst Z-Cars gets a mention in A Northern Wind, as well as Plater’s (younger) school-mate Tom Courtenay, our author doesn’t get cited at all. We’ll forgive Kynaston for now, though – maybe he’ll turn up in a later volume in relation to his sterling work on Close the Coalhouse Door, The Fosydke Saga or (long shot this) Oh No it’s Selwyn Froggitt.
There’s most certainly a cool, sharp northern wind blowing through A Smashing Day, Plater’s second play for TV (and his fifth overall for the BBC), broadcast on 17 August 1962 at 9.25pm, not least because it was produced in Manchester by Vivian Daniels, the BBC’s head of drama in the north region. A short (under an hour) drama about a morose nineteen-year-old Lennie (Alfred Lynch) and his more confident friend (John Thaw), the preview blurb in the Radio Times summarised the plot as follows: ‘Lennie has no intention of getting married or settling down to a steady job, but somehow his intentions and his actions are always strangers to each other, even when he is deciding which girl he wants to marry’.
A Smashing Day won universally positive reviews from the critics, who inevitably spotted an affinity between Plater and the current literary/cinematic wave of northern realism: comparisons were drawn with the plot, characterisations and milieu of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar (although the film version of the latter wasn’t out yet).
Fittingly, coming from the pen of a soon-to-be-ex-architect, A Smashing Day is sturdily constructed in six tight scenes. We first see Lennie bantering with his preening pal Stan whilst waiting for their respective blind-dates to show up, then undertaking some awkward courting with the conformist Anne (June Barry). A bit later, he’s at what the Radio Times describes as ‘the local hop’, where he hooks up the more free-spirited Liz (Angela Douglas) – think Julie Christie in Billy Liar – and a familiar kitchen-sink-drama dilemma kicks in. A wedding sequence follows, but Plater cunningly delays the revelation of who his bride is. It turns out to be the duller option, and we end with scenes showing Lennie’s humdrum domestic set-up, and Lennie randomly meeting Liz in a café, where they have a melancholy conversation freighted with ‘what if?’ tension.
A Smashing Day was the sixteenth most watched show in the UK that week, and the most-watched BBC programme. For Plater, it was a comment in The Spectator that seemed to have the greatest impact: ‘the voice was the voice of Coronation Street. The spirit was (if I don’t mind sticking my neck out) the spirit of Chekhov’. Plater had not at this point seen or read any Chekhov, but made a bee-line to Hull Central library to draw out what he could and quickly became a fan.
Today the most famous name in the cast is probably John Thaw, later of The Sweeney and Inspector Morse notoriety. He’d been in a couple of ITV dramas by this point, but didn’t really register in the pre-publicity, unlike Alfred Lynch and Angela Douglas, who were felt to have considerable lustre. The story goes that Plater had recommended Thaw for the role, because he happened to be lodging at the time with his old pal Tom Courtenay. The Manchester-born Thaw is, at least, a real northerner, among a mixed cast that leaves you wondering exactly which side of the Pennines A Smashing Day is supposed to be set – not that it matters, as we’re very much in the generic eeh-by-gum land of early Likely Lads and Z-Cars.
Speaking of which, it’s fun to spot a throwaway Z-Cars reference in the script, given that Plater would soon be writing for that very show himself. His jazz fandom also gets an early nod, as the opening credits roll to a recently released piece of music by the boppy pianist/singer Mose Allison: Plater’s own copy of the Back Country Suite EP was used for broadcast. Compared with the more overtly satirical flavour of much of Plater’s work broadcast up to this point, A Smashing Day feels more mature and keenly felt. A few years later, the Yorkshire Evening Post ran a curious article called 'My Husband is a Writer' where they canvassed the wives of notable writers (Mrs Braine, Mrs Hines, Mrs Livings etc) about their experiences of co-habiting with a stay-at-home wordsmith. Mrs Plater noted that A Smashing Day was one of her husband’s most personal pieces of writing. Which is a tad jarring, given that it’s hardly the best advertisement for married life.
The odd thing about A Smashing Day – which is the earliest Plater work known to have survived in the audio-visual archives – is that it’s simultaneously a quantum leap in confidence for the author, but also a bit shackled by its kitchen-sink realism and its over-familiar northern-lad-gets-ground-down-by-domesticity plotting. What it really needs to liven it up is… well, how about the Beatles?
One person who thought that a feasible idea was Peter Cheeseman, who was in charge of the Victoria Theatre, in Stoke-on-Trent. Following a suggestion by Plater’s agent – the formidable Peggy Ramsay – that he really ought to do stage writing if he wanted to be taken seriously, he adapted some of this earlier TV work for the Victoria, and also provided them with a new play, Ted’s Cathedral that ended up being translated for the small screen in 1964. Cheeseman reckoned that A Smashing Day would work well on stage, if opened out with some newly commissioned music, which led to the script being sent to the Beatles manager Brian Epstein, in the hope that the four lads would pen some numbers to pad out the show.
That obviously didn’t happen, but Epstein took interest in the play, and came to see it – flying up to Stoke in a private plane. A decision had been taken to let a couple of stage managers with theatrical aspirations sing self-penned numbers between the scenes. Their names? Ben Kingsley and Robert Powell, and the legend – which finds its way into many a biography of the man who went on to be Gandhi – goes that when the show transferred to the West End in 1966, John Lennon and Ringo Starr attended the premiere and advised them to pursue a musical career. Although Plater also wrote that he asked Lennon what he thought of the songs: not much, apparently.
Epstein had produced the show in London, and when the director John Fernald became indisposed at the last minute, he actually seems to have taken over. As a borderline Beatles obsessive, this fact does my head in slightly: Plater + Epstein, two worlds colliding, almost as crazy as the fact that one of Plater’s Z-Cars scripts was directed by a young Ridley Scott. Epstein’s involvement wasn’t totally random, as he was presumably accelerating his theatrical aspirations in anticipation of his main charges throwing in the touring and promotional towel – and he’d also produced a James Baldwin play the previous year. Nor was it Plater’s last dalliance with Lennon, who approached him in the late 1960s about writing a screen-play about James Hanratty, one of the last people in the UK to be executed for murder on questionable (and then ultimately over-turned) evidence.
Between the TV and stage versions, A Smashing Day also got re-made for radio in 1965, this time with James Bolam in the laddish side-kick role originally taken by John Thaw. By that time, Bolam was up and away with The Likely Lads, a playful – and obliquely north-eastern – take on social realism that has stood the test of time rather better. Of course, fast forward a couple of decades, and Bolam would be effectively playing a version of Plater himself in the wonderful Beiderbecke trilogy.
The Smashing Day stage show in London was something of a flop, clearly a factor in Plater’s subsequent embrace of regional theatre venues and sometimes parochial subject matter. And it’s fair to say that the drama – in all its iterations – lives on today almost entirely via the legends and anecdotes I’ve summarised thus far. Some things just get more storied than actually seen (or heard), and until A Smashing Day gets streamed, commercially released or granted a BBC4 repeat, that’s the way it’ll stay.
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