I can't recall which particular lockdown it was, but at some point during 2020, or maybe 2021, I happened to be browsing my DVD shelves for viewing ideas. So many discs, many still with their cellophane wrapper intact, including my copy of the Network compilation 'Alan Plater at ITV', as well as the box set of the same author's adaptation of The Good Companions (1980-81). One thought led, slowly, to another, and I decided I was going to spend the next few years working my way through every piece of Plater I could get my hands on - no mean feat, given that he was professionally active for fifty years across TV, film, radio and theatre, and as a novelist and journalist too.
So far, my strategy has been mostly to watch, listen and read purely as the fancy takes me, but the sequencing has been determined by access too, as the process of sourcing audio-visual, published and archival material has (and is) taking time. I've been helped along the way by pals providing me with off-air copies of some of the most obscure stuff, and the amazing work of TRILT/Box of Broadcasts, who have been tirelessly honouring my requests for Plater uploads onto BOB for the enjoyment of the scholarly community lucky enough to have access. I've also made the first of what I hope to be a series of forays to the Hull History Centre, which holds the intimidatingly comprehensive Plater archive of scripts, correspondence and all sorts.
As of early January 2023, my plan is to try to upload something every few days for the entire year - and beyond, perhaps. Or until I don't.
You may be wondering what the purpose of all this is. I'm not entirely sure myself, other than the evangelical urge to prove that Plater is one of the most significant and rewarding writers not to (yet) have his full due. Although I'm a film/TV academic, I aim to post personal, impressionistic reflections rather than anything particularly scholarly, massively researched or thought-through. While there's been some significant critical work on Plater by the likes of David Rolinson, William Gallagher, Joseph Oldham and others, we're still waiting for the first full-length survey of his career to appear. If all goes to plan, I'm going to make that happen, resulting in (hopefully) more detailed chronological and thematic analysis than allowed by this rather haphazard blog format.
I figured I would let the vagaries of BBC archival scheduling determine my first example, which happened to coincide with my decision to set up this blog. The What on the Landing was broadcast on Radio 4 Extra over the Christmas holiday period of December 2022, as part of their 'Bernard Cribbins Day', honouring the late actor, who would have turned 95 on 29 December.
The link is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gjgt - but will expire by the end of January 2023.
The What on the Landing was first broadcast on the BBC Home Service in August 1967, and BBC Genome tells us this 45-minute comedy drama was repeated on Radio 4 in 1972 and 1976. Unsurprisingly for anyone with a familiarity with Plater's early career, it was produced by Alfred Bradley in Leeds. There's not much in the way of plot. Cribbins is front and centre as the querulous Albert Chipchase, who is perturbed in his living room by the inexplicable sound of someone flushing his lavatory, prompting him to make a series of fruitless, digressive telephone calls to neighbours, the police and other accidentally dialled lines. The phantom flusher turns out in the end to be his wife, who hadn't in fact left the house as Chipchase had assumed.
It's not hard to hear Plater's voice in The What on the Landing, by my calculation his eight play for radio (although some of the previous ones had either been adapted from stage plays, or themselves adapted for theatre). The author's 'gritty northern surrealism' (a phrase he often trotted out in relation to perceptions of his work) is evident in the synthesis of the quotidian and the absurdist. But despite the Cribbins factor, this was a rather bleak listen for me, its suggestion of societal breakdown anticipating Plater's dark comedy series Middlemen (1977) and - to a degree - his Beiderbecke trilogy of dramas in the 1980s. There's more in the way of suburban malaise than belly laughs: reflecting on the unlikelihood of his neighbourhood being a nest of rapists and murderers, Chipchase acknowledges that 'everyone's dead in Windermere Close'.
Cribbins' character also says 'bastard' a lot. I know that he was in Hitchcock's icky Frenzy (1972), so I appreciate that there was more to him than kids TV and 'Right Said Fred' (1962), but I'm not familiar enough with his 1960s career trajectory to judge if or how much The What on the Landing represented a deliberate pivot into darker territory for the Jackanory guy.
I assume (possibly wrongly) that it was written specifically for Cribbins, given that the actor's association with Plater stretched back to his 1962 BBC Home Service play The Mating Season, in which Cribbins played an awkward young man going out on the pull getting inspiration from his cocksure but recently-married best mate. When I read the script of The Mating Season, I was in ignorance of the initial casting (it was later adapted for the theatre), and was imagining a younger, more Tom Courtenay-ish characterisation. By then in his mid-30s, he was doubtless too long in the tooth for the role, but that's the freedom of radio, I suppose.
Rather sweetly, Plater was still writing for Cribbins in the very last phase of his career, contributing a short story for the four-part Cribbins at Christmas series for Radio 4 first broadcast in 2007. Happily, it's available on youtube (see below).
Tantalisingly, the Alan Plater archive at Hull History Centre holds an undated file entitled 'Suggested Situation Comedy for Bernard Cribbins', containing a script for a television play about a 'man named Benny going for a job interview when he'd rather be practising for his singing competition at the local pub'. I suppose one would need to inspect the document itself to make an educated guess at the likely time of creation and its target audience: my curiosity is piqued enough to want to dig it out next time I'm in the Hull archives.
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