When I saw that Alan Plater had written a TV play called Night People, I assumed it would be set around a cool jazz club, with lots of references to the writer’s beloved musicians – and maybe with a cameo from Ronnie Scott thrown in for good measure. But when it went out in 1978, as part of the BBC’s Play of the Week strand, Plater hadn’t yet entered the jazz advocacy phase that arguably began properly with his Beiderbecke dramas of the mid-1980s and then continued through a cycle of one-off dramas like Misterioso (1991), Doggin’ Around (1994) and The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2000). In that body of work, the ‘night people’ are the charismatic folk that haunt the after-hours jazz clubs, who retreat into noir fantasy, and who most certainly – to coin a phrase – hear the music.
Against my expectations, the action of Night People actually takes place around 3am one evening in ‘Lorelei Services’, a drab motorway pitstop in an undisclosed location somewhere in the North of England. It looks like a real service station has been used for filming, although the plasticky seats, fake shrubbery, reflective windows and harsh lighting give it the air of a studio recreation anyway – it’s as near as you’re going to get to Edward Hopper on this budget, though.
Unappetizing food and beverage is served up to customers by the intimidating chef Ted (Bill Dean being very Bill Dean) – rarely seen without his meat cleaver - and the waitress Jenny (Sheila Fearn), who acts as Greek chorus when observing that she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She also stirs memories of Plater’s well-known 'Quiet Night' episode of Z Cars (1962-78), by noting that she’s never known the place so quiet.
Customers arrive in the shape of: a fractious string quartet, needing to fix their malfunctioning tour van as they ineffectively pursue their dream of bringing ‘chamber music to the masses’; a gloomy football fan (Peter Benson) crawling the long way home after yet another defeat; an upbeat salesman (Henry Livings) all too aware that his get-rich-scheme of flogging solar energy panels is entirely moonshine; and an elderly man (Phil McCall) with confused war memories.
As the lugubrious ‘Rovers’ supporter, Peter Benson gives the most wonderfully laconic line deliveries, even when just giving his order for sausage, beans and chips. It was only when I did a quick bit of online research into the history of motorway services in the UK that I realised how strongly they were associated in the 1970s with football hooliganism – hence the joke in Night People about its lonely, weedy football fan being an unlikely source of aggro, and the explanation for why its chef character seems to interpret every customer order like a threat of violence. Plater doesn’t challenge the stereotype of horrendous cuisine, though.
It's a quiet night tonight, and not much happens to begin with. Most of the dramatic interest relates to the string quartet, which has two violinists married to each other, but one (Myra Francis) lusting after the bolshy cellist (Christian Rodska) who doubles up as road manager, van mechanic and main commentator on the action. He identifies his tribe as being the ones that come out at night, speaking a language that ‘day people’ can’t comprehend, one without faith, hope or charity. The characterisations bear out his notion of the nocturnal as those with failure stamped upon them from birth: the forlorn football fan says he’s so inured to defeat he can’t comprehend what success would be like, the salesman isn’t really committed to his useless product, and the quartet decides to break up because of public indifference to their toil.
But then, in the last section of the play, an older Geordie couple arrive (Jean Heywood and Colin Douglas), asking for champagne and inviting all the other customers to toast them. Former childhood sweethearts, they have spent their lifetime apart, but have only now made the radical step of leaving their long-term partners and running away to Gretna Green – stopping off for champagne along the way. In celebration, the quartet play a bit of their Beethoven repertoire, which morphs into a rockier number (in fact, a song by the composer Dave Greenslade) and everybody breaks into a merry dance. They leave, the services go dark, and the credits roll.
By which time, you’re quite happy to leave too. That’s not a criticism: what I mean is that Plater knows the exact measure of character, plot and ideas required to sustain a standalone, hour-long drama – and how to balance the pleasures of repetition and call-back, with those of escalation and surprise. As I’ve already mentioned, the reference in the script to this being a ‘quiet night’ is surely a nod to Plater’s infamous ‘nocturnal’ episode of Z Cars, where nothing much seems to happen, but a lot actually does.
It’s a boring location, with unappetising food, and an unlovely décor - and some of the characters are borderline tedious: Peter Benson’s football fan seems to have wandered in from a Mike Leigh play, for instance. Dave Greenslade’s score is mostly melancholic synthesiser noodling, which is fairly suiting. But there are also dramatic revelations, professional crises and even a spot of cathartic violence, when the football chap decides to play the hooligan for a few seconds and smash up some furniture, albeit rather apologetically. And I’ve mentioned already that everything culminates in the ensemble dancing tipsily to a Greenslade song with pretty literal lyrics: ‘sing your song, good people of the night’ etc.
Night People is too slight to be considered truly first-division Plater, lacking the observational detail and satirical bite of his best work. However, there’s a huge pleasure to be had in seeing him winning the creative challenge he’s set himself to write an entertaining play about an intrinsically boring environment. Like the motorway café setting itself, it’s a pit-stop between more interesting places, but gives you exactly what you need. Probably best not touch the food, though.
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