Alan Plater never finished his university studies. His period in Newcastle in the late 1950s reading architecture was clearly not time wasted, though, as he soaked up the city’s jazz scene, got involved with rag revues and turned up his nose at the arrival of rock’n’roll. Having dropped out, he took up a job in an architectural firm in Hull, but it wasn’t long before drama writing became his true professional calling – and the rest is history.
For a man who never got his degree, Plater did seem rather drawn to academic characters, setting and ideas. For instance, among his self-devised work, Tales of Sherwood Forest (1989) and Oliver’s Travels (1995) feature main characters who are former Polytechnic lecturers, the play Seventeen Per Cent Said Shove Off (1972) concerns an Oxbridge postgraduate undertaking sociological study of a working-class milieu, and Curiculee Curicula (1978) is a satirical rock musical about a workman causing chaos among the ivory towers. Academics feature too in adaptation work such as Fortunes of War (1987) and Death is Part of the Process (1986), and there’s a case to be made for the Trollope books Plater adapted into The Barchester Chronicles (1982) being a kind of precursor to campus comedy. The collision of life and learning is one of Plater’s main themes – just think of Selwyn Froggitt’s pride in his subscription to the Times newspaper in Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt (1974-78), or the significance of the school setting in the Beiderbecke trilogy.
Watching Plater’s contributions to the popular crime drama Lewis (2006-15), which were his own devising rather than based on pre-existing material (although obviously based on the characters and setting established by Colin Dexter in his Morse books), I sense his delight in mucking about among the dreaming spires, and knocking experts and authority figures off their pedestals. Plater absolutely deserved the gig – after all, he’d been writing for popular crime drama series ever since Z Cars (1962-78) and had pride in being an honest craftsman. But in his episodes of Lewis there is most definitely a maverick twinkle in his eye, and a warm identification with the character of Robbie Lewis, the displaced northerner who (in his words in ‘The Quality of Mercy’ of 2009) has ‘had to put up with a lot of Oxford bollocks’.
Plater’s first contribution to Lewis was the third episode of the first series, ‘Old School Ties’, first shown in 2007. The plot revolves around the former hacking exploits of a criminal turned successful author. The hacker happens to be, like Sergeant Lewis and the actor who plays him (Kevin Whately), a Tynesider – but Lewis is not at all charmed by this person he describes as ‘professional Geordie’: that is, someone who trades professionally and personally on a certain performance of North-Easternness. I can imagine that Whately and Plater had quite the conspiratorial chuckle over this line, given that Whately himself was famously part of what was often described on Tyneside as the ‘Geordie mafia’ of writers and actors associated in particular with the TV series Auf Wiedersehen Pet (1983-2005). I’ve got way more to say on Plater and the Auf Wiedersehen Pet connection, but I’ll save that for another day. As it happens, the ‘professional Geordie’ in this episode, who has in the past scammed gullible Oxford colleges out of money, turns out to be a sham: despite what he tells everyone, he hails not from Byker – well known nationally as a signifier of working-class grit – but from Newcastle’s upmarket suburb of Jesmond.
For the second Lewis series of 2008, Plater wrote ‘And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea’, about a rogue lecturer who draws gifted students into a scheme to forge historic documents – the title is in reference to a plan to fake letters by the poet Shelley. Plater has great fun here with notions of impersonation, and the conflict between artistic individuality and good old craftsmanship. The corrupt professor behind the forgery scam delivers a scathing critique of those who presume to decipher the ‘writer’s intentions’ when reading the romantic poets. Of the two students he has brought into his scheme, one has creative playfulness, the other has representational acumen but an inability to ‘make things up’. Despite the warning within the very script not to make an auteurist reading of all this, it’s tempting to see this combination of creativity and craft – as represented by the two characters – as Plater’s assessment of the ideal skillset of the TV writer, particularly where relative ‘hackwork’ like Lewis is concerned.
‘And the Moonbeams’ also exudes Plater’s confidence in indulging his own, familiar fancies.
If you’re playing Plater Bingo, you’ll quickly score with the numerous references to comedy (such as the Marx Brothers) and, of course, jazz musicians (Lester Young and Duke Ellington get a mention). Lewis’s sidekick Hathaway refers to the romantic poets as ‘the guys in the band’, and there’s a throwaway gag about Tolkien playing banjo in a jazz ensemble during his time at Oxford. In his previous episode, Plater also introduces the idea that the rather inscrutable Hathaway plays guitar in a ‘fusion’ group mixing jazz, rock, world music and madrigals – ‘Old School Ties’ actually ends with Hathaway offering his earphones to Lewis so he can have a listen. I can’t imagine Lewis would be a fan, and I’m unsure that it would be Plater's cup of tea either.
Plater’s contribution to the third series of 2009 was ‘The Quality of Mercy’, which is the one with the plot developments that lead Lewis to his outburst about being tired of ‘Oxford bollocks’. There’s another rogue professor, this one going on a killing spree to protect her academic reputation, because her star post-doc student is being blackmailed about not being the true author of her doctoral thesis. The characters are all involved in a student production of The Merchant of Venice, hence the Shakespearean reference in the title, which allows Plater sport in mocking the libidos, ambition and duplicity of the acting profession. When Lewis makes the observation – true in Plater’s case - that you hardly need academic qualifications to work in the theatre, you again can feel the writer giggling into his typewriter. In the episode, the person who actually ghost-wrote the successful, paradigm-shifting doctorate turns out to be a chippy, northern, socialist playwright who had actually dropped out of his degree – funny, that.
Plater’s fourth and last Lewis episode, ‘Your Sudden Death Question’, went out the following year in 2010. The central premise is that of a gathering of ‘quizaholics’ in an Oxford college, with paired teams of students, ageing academics, teachers, mothers and lawyers all competing for a prize that turns out to a scam overseen by a smarmy host played by Alan Davies. Squint hard enough, and you could imagine the scenes involving the quizzers scooped out into an affable standalone 50-minute play of the kind Plater was producing in the 1970s. The quiz scenario permits Plater to have fun with football, architecture and music-based trivia, and an early mention of Aristotle is clearly a nod to Plater’s Oliver’s Travels book/series, which featured a trivia-obsessed ex-lecturer pursuing the mystery of a missing crossword compiler named after the Greek polymath.
The murder plot is less engaging: one of the teachers turns out to have been a whistle-blower on some dodgy business involving dubious Russians investing in a new building for the university’s engineering department – and then one of the lawyers kills two of the quizzers to cover the truth. More noteworthy is the description of the first victim as a promising young translator reduced from producing ‘radical versions of great authors’ to doing hackwork as an interpreter for businessmen. The character in question happens to be a bit of a prick and a womaniser, so you’re not sorry to see him pass away in the first half – but I have a bad feeling that Plater was addressing his own frustrations here at the processes involved in writing big-budget, populist drama in the 21st century.
‘Your Sudden Death Question’ was broadcast only a few weeks before Plater passed away on 25 June 2010. His final one-off play Joe Maddison’s War was broadcast posthumously, and in many ways is a neater proposition as a final, more personal statement: for a start, it’s set in Plater’s beloved Tyneside, during the second-world-war, and also stars Kevin Whately, alongside other actors associated with different stages of the writer’s career. But I think it's reasonable to say that these four episodes of Lewis represent a poignant summing-up too, reminding us of his skills in working within genre formats, and how he still found opportunity for some playful commentary on aspects of his career and identity as a writer.
It’s not quite the equivalent of, say, what Dennis Potter was up to in Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (1996), and it would be crass for me to speculate that Plater was writing some of these episodes in the knowledge of the finite nature of his career. But whatever struggles and compromises he may have had getting his voice heard in his later years, it rings loud and clear here in these Lewis contributions. Bollocks to Oxford, indeed.
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