Although I’m starting to get a handle on Plater’s trajectory as a TV writer, I’ve still got some work to do to fathom his radio career. It was radio where he got his first broadcast credit in 1961, but his commitment to the medium wavered over the years. Many of his radio plays were adaptations of existing work for TV or the theatre, including the one I’m talking about here. But looking at his radio CV, I struggle to see obvious phases or patterns, in the way that is feasible for his TV and theatre output. I decided to give Who’s Jimmy Dickenson a listen because at the moment it’s the earliest example I can easily find online of Plater on the radio – with the exception of The What on the Landing, which I’ve already covered on this blog.
Jimmy Dickenson first went out on BBC Radio 4 on 10 February 1986, and has appeared a few times since on the BBC’s archive radio channel Radio 4 Extra (and its precursor BBC7). It was based on a stage play called Well…. Goodnight Then, which was commissioned for the Humberside Theatre (Hull) and first performed 1978. I think I prefer the stage title, which provides the play’s neat running gag about ‘well…. goodnight then’ being the phrase you use at a social gathering when you’re planning to leave, but inevitably just end up staying even longer.
The social gathering in Jimmy Dickenson takes places in the suburban Hull home of the middle-aged couple Sara (Stephanie Turner) and Randolph (David Fleeshman), who are hosting Sara’s bolshy younger brother Geoff (Sam Kelly) and his girlfriend of barely 24 hours, Marian (Sue Jenkins). They’re playing board-games, there’s some cheating, a bit of sniping, and you fear that 85 minutes in their company is going to be a long haul. But Plater slowly reveals the reasons behind the simmering tension. And the chief one is the unseen Jimmy Dickenson, who we learn – via flashbacks – has been leading the humourless Randolph into a series of off-kilter business ventures, culminating in Randolph's financial ruin. As the party drags on until the early hours, Dickenson crashes back into their lives unexpectedly. Indeed, every time someone says the dreaded words ‘well… goodnight then’ – which usually is around the point you’re wondering where all this is going – Plater pivots the plot somewhere unexpected. When discussing dramatic structure, Plater would often refer to what his agent Peggy Ramsay used to say: that the audience just needed an occasional surprise to keep them on their toes, never mind any highfalutin Robert McKee-type nonsense.
The original play was first performed in 1978, not too long after the broadcast of Plater’s six-part comedy-drama series Middle Men (1977), and there are thematic parallels. In Middle Men, the charismatic Stanley (Francis Matthews) persuades the more straight-laced George (Frank Windsor) to embark on a series of outlandish schemes, after they lose their middle-class, white-collar jobs. There’s a similar relationship between the suburban Randolph and the infamous Jimmy Dickenson, who may be a dangerous criminal, but brings excitement, risk and opportunity to his life and work. There’s a further twist in the last few minutes, when Randolph’s wife reveals that, unbeknownst to her husband, Jimmy Dickenson has been spicing up her life… in a very different way.
Like many fans of Plater, I highly rate Middle Men, so I’ll forgive Jimmy Dickenson for offering a slighter variation on its themes of class, capital and subversion. It also doesn’t help that the characters spell out rather directly to each other the central idea about life and work being a kind of game-play, replete with winners and losers, snakes and ladders, players and victims etc.
I was also slightly put out by Plater straying a little into what I identified (possibly reductively and unfairly) as Alan Ayckbourn territory – that is, of discontented suburbia. That said, the Ayckbourn connection is interesting, and something I’ve rarely heard mention of in coverage of Plater’s career. A recurring joke of his biographical Peggy For You play (1999) is his depiction of his mighty agent being confused about the difference between the two ‘northern Alans’ who were both on her books at the same time. Given that Ayckbourn directed and/or starred in some early Plater stage plays, and also produced some of his 1960s radio plays, it maybe wasn’t that ridiculous a muddle for her.
You can listen to the play on the Internet Archive.
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