The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two-Sheds (2006), with its running time of an hour, was the last of Plater’s single TV dramas broadcast in his lifetime. But the headline-grabbing fact is that it was also the first time in around twenty years that he had written a standalone drama that didn’t run to feature length. Depending on how you define ‘feature length’ – for the purpose of argument, let’s say something of 80 minutes plus – you’d have to go back as far as the D. H. Lawrence tribute Coming Through (1988). And if you’re talking about something closer to the 50-minute mark, you’d have to go back to the 1970s.
Going out in BBC One’s Afternoon Play (2003-07) strand meant that Billy Two-Sheds was always going to seem like a throwback to a different era: that supposedly golden period for British TV writers of the 1960s and 1970s when commissions and audiences for single plays were plentiful. The Afternoon Play strand took the form of five newly-commissioned one-hour dramas per year, stripped across the schedules of one particular week in mid-to-late January. To say that Plater was one of the highest-profile contributors runs the risk of belittling the careers of others who got involved, such as the writer Rowan Joffe, the writer/director Dominic Keavey (who wrote and/or directed three of the twenty-five dramas in the series), and Jim Cartwright. But getting Plater to write something for the fourth series was surely a coup, even though, as a veteran of anthology and one-off drama writing – and historically for talky, modestly-budgeted productions – this commission was decidedly in his wheelhouse.
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Billy Two-Sheds has a very young Jodie Whittaker (this is in fact the earliest credit on her IMDB profile) as a student called Sam reading philosophy in Birmingham who receives the keys to her grandfather’s nearby allotment, which also comes with not one, but two sheds. A Monty Python reference? I’m not sure, but for the sake of argument, why not. Sam initially can’t comprehend the appeal of the allotment, and besides, has no time for digging and weeding between her university work and her two jobs. But spending time with the neighbouring folks on the allotment – a doctor, a radio presenter, an ageing hippy, etc – leads her to an appreciation of its therapeutic benefit, as a place where people actually slow down enough to talk and listen to each other, away from the hectic world of corporate box-ticking. When a big, horrible development company threatens to concrete it over to build a health farm, Sam gets some assistance from her lawyer boyfriend to help the allotment association send them packing.
One of the characters reveals in the opening few minutes that the group is called the ‘Pebble Mill Allotments Association’, which rings a loud, clanging bell in the ears of anyone familiar with the history of British broadcasting, particularly that of the BBC's regional commitments and output. At the time Billy Two-Sheds went out in 2006, the BBC’s Pebble Mill Studio complex, in the suburbs of Birmingham – and not far from the university campus that provides the backdrop to numerous scenes in the play – had only fairly recently been closed and demolished. Knowing all this, you’re neatly primed for Plater’s representation of the allotment – occasionally shown against the frantic city-scape in the distance – as a place where mundanity, self-indulgence and sheer slowness are all totally necessary, utterly welcome. It’s admittedly not subtle, but Plater has earned his right to hammer his point home about what we stand to lose with the decline of the single-play tradition.
The nostalgia levels rise further through the casting of James ‘Beiderbecke’ Bolam in the titular role of Sam’s late grandpa – Billy Two-Sheds himself. Billy appears as a ghost to the young Sam, spinning a number of tall tales that gently satirise a certain strain of Geordie self-mythologizing. At one point she calls out his stories as ‘bullshit’ – a word I was surprised to hear on a daytime TV drama. There’s a fanciful plot twist in which one of his dubious stories actually proves instrumental in saving the allotment from the evil developers – but not before he disappears telling her ‘I can’t solve all your problems for you, I’m only a flaming ghost’, which made me laugh. Again, it’s not hard to discern Plater’s commentary here on the necessity of a bit of bullshit to keep a person sane, let alone entertained.
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Jodie Whittaker was unknown to TV/film audiences when Billy Two-Sheds first aired, but nearly twenty years on there’s a baton-passing piquancy to these scenes involving her and Bolam. Not simply because we’re seeing the apprenticeship of a young performer who would go on to be so prominent in the next two decades, but also because the person she plays has the faint glimmerings of a future Plater character actor, once she’s grown up a bit. There’s a telling moment where Sam delivers a gag involving the confusion of the name of a philosopher with a footballer, which is an extremely familiar device across Plater’s work for TV, radio and theatre – where the name of someone is introduced in the dialogue, and someone else presumes them in jest to be a sportsperson or a musician. It’s also nice to see Paul Copley in the cast, given his appearance in Plater fan-favourites like Trinity Tales (1976).
Billy Two-Sheds wears its modest budgeting upfront, not least by using locations close to BBC Birmingham, and exploiting music rights agreements by using snippets of pre-existing pop music for mood-setting and scene changes. I’m so used to Plater-sanctioned scoring for his projects – and jazz in particular – that I found the inclusion of performers like Sigur Rós, Air, Brian Eno, Zero 7, Mercury Rev and The Cinematic Orchestra rather discombobulating, as if someone in the production team had simply reached out for an ‘ambient post-rock’ compilation for inspiration. Despite the rather hackneyed choices here – Eno’s ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ appears twice – they do accentuate the mellow, easy-going vibe.
According to the catalogue of his work at Hull History Centre, Plater had ideas around 2003 for a full TV series entitled ‘Up the Allotments’, and there is an un-dated draft proposal in the collection for a six-part series about ‘life on a set of allotments in the North East of England’, which was presumably the same thing. Around this time, Plater was writing a series of plays for what was now his ‘home’ theatre company – Live Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne. These plays deal head on with forces of change and regeneration on Tyneside, where the ‘allotment’ is a somewhat loaded concept, given its associations with working-class culture and identity. The allotment association in the Midlands-set Billy Two-Sheds is a significantly egalitarian group: a mix of gender, race, age, class, and profession. But it’s presided over by the ghost of an exiled Geordie, and saved from extinction by a sparky young woman with a strong Yorkshire accent. How could we expect otherwise?
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