I was bamboozled when I found out fairly recently that Plater had written an episode of Spender (1991-93), the gritty early 1990s police drama and star vehicle for Jimmy Nail. I watched Spender all the way through about ten years ago, and obviously had missed Plater’s name on the credits.
How slipshod of me.
But actually, I can sleep easy. For it transpires that Plater’s contribution to the show – the episode ‘The Golden Striker’, the fifth of the second series – was credited on screen under the pseudonym ‘Kenneth Ladd’. As far as I’m aware, this was the only time Plater removed his name from a broadcast project, although he wasn’t shy about going public whenever a programme or series didn’t turn out how he hoped it would be.
Sammy Johnson (Stick) and Jimmy Nail (Spender)
If you’re familiar with Jimmy Nail’s reputation, you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking: that ‘creative differences’ had reared their head, and someone took the huff. Although I’ve not yet found any evidence to corroborate this assumption, it’s possible that a kind of Geordie omertà was in place among Plater’s tight circle of Tyneside collaborators.
The Auf Widersehen Pet cast
Indeed, the Tyneside press didn’t call the breakout stars of the early 1980s comedy/drama series Auf Wiedersehen Pet (1983-2004) the ‘Geordie mafia’ for nothing. At the centre of that show, about itinerant workers travelling abroad, were three North-East actors who Plater would write extensively for over the next twenty years. I’ve covered elsewhere the North-East in-jokes that pepper Plater’s writing for Lewis (2006-15), the detective series starring Kevin ‘Nev’ Whately. For Tim ‘Dennis’ Healy, Plater wrote a cycle of plays staged by the Newcastle-based Live Theatre company. Whereas his involvement with Jimmy 'Oz' Nail was merely a one-and-done affair – and not even that, strictly speaking.
Val McLane and Jimmy Nail
As it happens, Plater also wrote an episode for Timothy ‘Barry’ Spall’s vehicle Frank Stubbs Promotes (1993-94), and that episode happened to star Tim Healy. And if anyone has the urge to translate all this into a Venn diagram of connections, I would point you towards the casting in Plater’s Spender episode of John Woodvine as an intimidating gangster type. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Woodvine and Plater intersected across almost half a century of TV, from Z Cars (1962-78) to Close the Coalhouse Door (1968), right through to Plater’s last broadcast drama for ITV, Joe Maddison's War (2010). Oh, and ‘The Golden Striker’ also has a small role for Val McLane, who as well as being Jimmy Nail’s sister, was also one of the founders, alongside Tim Healy, of the Live Theatre stage company – which Plater would regard as his ‘home’ commissioning theatre in the latter years of his writing career.
John Woodvine
Spender was designed by Jimmy Nail, and its co-creator Ian La Frenais, as a noirish, soapy crime drama that simultaneously showed off the televisual potential of the North-East landscape, but also dramatized its creators’ ambivalence towards their place of origin. The gist of the show is that Nail – at the time famous mostly for being a walking stereotype of Geordie aggro – has reinvented himself as a suited, taciturn detective with marital problems and all kinds of existential dilemmas about his work, life and homeplace.
Plater’s episode is typical of the series as a whole in its exploitation of visually interesting and diverse North-East locations. There’s a lot of moody strolling by Spender and his associates around industrial Tyneside; in fact, the episode uses the kinds of locations that Plater specified years earlier in the script for his unmade ‘Bobby Dazzlers’ film project (which I talk about here).
Jimmy Nail and Stephen Thirkeld (playing Kenny Cooper, the missing footballer)
The main plot strand concerns Spender’s search for a missing footballer who has recently been sold by Newcastle United to an Italian team. The young Geordie striker is a troubled soul who ultimately confides to Spender that his problem is that he can’t stay in the North East, but doesn’t want to leave either; he just wants to play football, and not be commodified and exploited by agents and dealers wanting him to be a ‘moving billboard’ to sell branded gear.
If the ‘Kenneth Ladd’ credit invites speculation on the working relationship between the writer and the show’s creators, it leaves us with the question of whether this episode has any qualities we might identify as Plateresque. There are indeed some throwaway elements of comedy that struck me as typically Plater. The first occurs in an otherwise humdrum scene of plot exposition where Spender is asked by his superiors if the name Cooper means anything to him. He responds, drily: ‘Gary? Gladys? Henry? James Fennimore? In that case it’s a guy that makes barrels, isn’t it?’ He’s being deliberately awkward, because the meeting is happening in an executive box overlooking the pitch of St James’s Park, and he knows they are referring to the missing footballer Kenny Cooper. It’s actually an inversion of a recurring Plater joke where a character asks another if they have heard of a particular person, and the other responds by assuming they are a referring to a footballer (or sometimes a musician).
She's Lying?
Another Plateresque bit of business is a recurring gag about music. The affair with the missing footballer prompts Spender’s sidekick Stick (Sammy Johnson) to whistle the tune known to football fans as ‘Here We Go’. Spender witheringly tells him that it’s not really called ‘Here We Go’, and throughout the episode Stick keeps on thinking he’s worked out where it derives from. Is it the 'Colonel Bogey March'? No. Is it ’76 Trombones’? Hardly. Once the plot about the footballer has been resolved, the episode ends with a final scene of banter between Spender and Stick, as they come to the realisation that it’s based – of course! - on the Sousa march ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’.
The ironic thing is that these jokes about names and authorship can easily be read as a pointed commentary on the decision taken to remove Plater’s name from the credits. I can only speculate on how much of Plater’s writing survives in the ‘Kenneth Ladd’ script that made it to screen, or indeed on whether there’s some sort of crossword-esque clue hidden in that name (it does sound a little like Kenith Trodd, the famed TV producer, known in particular for his work with Dennis Potter). And what if those elements I’ve identified as being signature Plater turned out not to be his work after all?
Over the course of Plater's career, he often contributed one or two episodes to longer-running series with their own distinctive style and identity. Although the Kenneth Ladd situation was unusual, it’s a reminder of the dangers of confirmation bias when considering such episodes in isolation. I will admit to having watched ‘The Golden Striker’ with my notebook poised for the jotting down of Platerisms - and naturally, I found them, but was I deceiving myself?
Ain't no doubt it's Plater?
I will also confess to totally failing the ‘Here We Go’ challenge as I watched the episode, as - just like Stick - I couldn’t remember who its composer actually was. What’s worse, I vaguely and wrongly recalled it as being based on some operatic aria or other – Sousa never entered my mind until Spender revealed the answer just before the credits rolled. Whoever ‘Kenneth Ladd’ is or was, he played a blinder.
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