One of the distinctive and pleasing aspects of Plater’s career is his comfort in writing ‘trigger’ material for educational or instructional purpose. Terry, starring Dennis Waterman as a young man with minimal school education struggling to find a meaningful job, was the first of two plays that Plater wrote for the BBC’s then-new but eventually long-running Scene (1968-2007) strand of plays and documentaries for teenagers.
According to the extremely useful Broadcast for Schools website, there was a related documentary made for the Scene strand called ‘Being Happy, That’s What Counts’ (first broadcast 6 February 1969), which seems to no longer exist in the archive. Fortunately, Terry wasn’t wiped, and was being repeated as late as the mid-1990s; it turned up on BBC schools programming on 22 April 1994, and also as part of Janet Street-Porter’s Def II (1988-1994) early-evening programming strand for teenagers on 20 September 1993. The latter was billed as a ‘vintage’ drama in the Radio Times, but despite Def II being in the habit of rebroadcasting older, cult shows – like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-81) for instance – the inclusion of Terry was a curious one. And there’s a problematic aspect of the programme, which I’ll come back to, which makes me wonder whether or not its 1990s daytime and teatime repeats went out in an edited version.
Terry is dominated by Waterman’s cheerful, matey addresses to camera, explaining the aversion to the demands of paid labour that brings him into antagonism with his exasperated bosses, his hectoring parents, his world-wearing Youth Employment Officer and his increasingly weary girlfriend. We hear how he has undertaken 23 positions in the two years since leaving school without any O Levels, and see him losing his patience with soul-destroying work, firstly assembling cardboard boxes for ‘Universal Products’, and then undertaking an inscrutable clerical position for the ‘International Moneybox Corporation’.
In response to constant questioning from those around him about when he is going to ‘pull himself together’, Terry develops a philosophy of sorts that starts to question the whole purpose of education and labour. When told by one of his bosses that he can’t beat the system, he asks about the people that own the system, to be told: ‘that’s economics – not for the likes of you and me to discuss economics’.
But the lad is not without dreams and aspiration, telling his girlfriend of his fancy to be a wood-carving artisan, a ‘feller that does the carvings on the ends of [church] pews’. He speculates that the people who own the system are able to ‘spend all their days whittling, and whittling, and whittling’. The play ends with a still-chipper Terry selling hot-dogs at a fairground, happy in a temporary job in the sunshine, without any worries about the future.
Clocking in at just under half an hour, Terry throws in a lot of big, even radical ideas for its teenage viewers to chew over, which makes me wonder whether classroom teachers found themselves cursing or praising Plater’s skilful writing. Viewed in the context of Plater’s near-contemporaneous TV output, Terry can perhaps be understood as an adolescent return to the themes percolating through his To See How Far It Is trilogy of feature-length plays for the Theatre 625 strand in 1968. In the first of those plays, ‘Murphy’s Law’ (BBC2, 1 January 1968), the titular Murphy character goes steadily bonkers working his way through the ranks of a company manufacturing cardboard boxes – a similar firm to the one that Terry escapes, after seeing his boss – who boasts of thirty-one years in employment there - desperately quaffing aspirins.
The one element of Terry that slightly disconcerts today is its blokey quality. Waterman’s character repeatedly exclaims that his nagging girlfriend reminds him of his mother, and a line about the wearing of a suit making him feel like a ‘fairy’ obviously doesn’t age well. But most striking of all is the opening sequence, in which Terry greets the audience whilst daubing his name (and that of Plater too) with paint on a wall covered with photographs from what look like ‘girly’ magazines. I’ll own up to pausing my copy to check that my eyes weren’t deceiving me, and observing at least two pairs of naked breasts on prominent display. Again, I wonder what those teachers thought, or maybe 1969 - and indeed 1993 - are simply another country.
A version of the screenplay of Terry was published in 1972 as part of a Longman collection of scripts from the show, alongside some ‘talking points’ for classroom use. The inclusion of other plays by the likes of Ronald Eyre and Fay Weldon is a reminder of the calibre of writers involved in Scene and other BBC Schools programmes. One quirk of the published play, which is not a transcript but likely an earlier draft, is that it is clearly set in northern England, with references, for example, to ‘mam and dad’ and Stockport County football club swapped out in the broadcast version for ‘mum and dad’ and Queens Park Rangers.
Clearly, Terry is of interest outside its immediate educational context. Plater would go on to write another drama for Scene - 1970’s Let There Be Light, once thought lost but now recovered. Also for BBC Schools, he wrote ‘Man Made the Slave’ (1981) for the British Social History series, and ‘Trade Unions: Seven Days That Shook Young Jim’ (1976) for Going to Work. He also contributed a playlet to the BBC’s Open University strand in 1981. I’ve struggled to find out much about this, but it seems to have been called ‘Reunion’ and shown as part of a series called Risk. It was repeated a few times over the next few years, as was an accompanying discussion programme.
For more general viewers, there was also the five-part For the Love of Albert series of 1977, in which short, stylised plays on themes of citizenship were triggers for sometimes fractious studio discussion (see David Rolinson's article for more detail). In a similar fashion, The Family Rules was a 75-minute oddity shown on primetime BBC One in 1984, and presented by Frank Bough, in which short soap-style vignettes of family interaction written by Plater were used to inspire debate about the ‘pleasures and pitfalls of being one of the family’. In a similar fashion, his short playlet Onion, about a disciplinary hearing by the Football Association was commissioned for the soccer-themed edition of the arts magazine show Second House (1973-76). Having seen the edition in full, I wonder what Plater thought about the veracity and likelihood of his mini-drama being challenged after transmission by none other than Jackie Charlton, speaking to host Melvyn Bragg in the studio.
As evidenced by its eventual repeat twenty years after transmission, Terry has arguably had the most significant afterlife of all these educational/trigger plays. But like the others mentioned above – or at least the ones I’ve been able to see so far – it showcases Plater’s strengths as a writer, capable of writing to commission work that is witty, individual and entertaining, whilst also being succinct, utilitarian and audience-appropriate.
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