Speaking in his radio series Abandoned Projects, Plater admitted that, for all his many successes over forty years as a writer, the projects that haunted his imagination were the ones that never got made. Broadcast in five, fifteen-minute parts in 2005, Abandoned Projects is a juicy listen, a mixture of confessional autobiography, creative salvage and starry gossip (there are tales of encounters with Rex Harrison, John Lennon and others). Ironically enough, the series itself emerged out of an abandoned project, as Plater had initially intended his ‘what if’ memoir to be published in book form – and some of the material from the series would find its way into his Doggin’ Around book of 2006.
Alex Glasgow
The Plater archive at the Hull History Centre contains various files pertaining to these lost works, some simply existing as initial ideas, others as more fleshed-out scripts and correspondence. You can also often find reference to un-coming attractions when reading profiles and interviews. Among the more intriguing ones, for me, are: his planned adaptation for ITV of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the late 1970s, apparently thwarted by the channel’s realisation it would be cheaper just to show Polanski’s 1979 film; a historical Windrush-themed drama cooked up in the 1990s with the comedian/actor Lenny Henry; and an adaptation of Tom Courtenay’s autobiography around the turn of the century. I’m also deeply curious about a mooted play entitled ‘The Golden Age’, set around a regional TV company in the 1970s.
But the one that I want to talk about here, and which Plater focusses upon in the first episode of his Abandoned Projects series, is the film musical known variously as ‘Bobby Dazzlers’ and ‘Xanadu’ that Plater worked on with the singer-songwriter Alex Glasgow in the late 1960s. In the radio programme, Plater explains how he and Glasgow had become ‘flavour of the month for about a week’ through the critical success of the 1968 stage musical Coal the Coalhouse Door, scripted by Plater out of the short stories of Sid Chaplin, and with songs by Glasgow.
Plater describes ‘Xanadu/Bobby Dazzlers’ as an awkward mixture of Geordie magic realism and revolutionary socialism. I have read a version of the script held in the Plater archive, and this is a fair assessment – it’s difficult to align it with any contemporaneous trends in British film-making, although it has some of the madcap spirit of 1960s Richard Lester. There’s a growing academic interest in the phenomenon of the ‘unmade film’ – the shadow histories of projects that never saw the light of day. However, when I’ve been reading Plater’s unmade scripts, the experience is qualitatively similar to reading screenplays for TV programmes that no longer exist in the archives, and stage scripts for productions that are similarly lost to time.
The idea for ‘Xanadu/Bobby Dazzlers’ came about when the producer Kenneth Harper encouraged Plater to come up with something more upbeat than the mining-themed Coalhouse, which resulted in a Tyneside-set love story about a Wallsend shipyard crane-operator courting an office typist. Harper ended up producing The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), Plater’s first completed film, but he is probably best known for his association with the pop singer Cliff Richard, for whom he produced four movies. As Plater amusingly recounts in Abandoned Projects, that’s what led to Cliff – nobody’s idea of a Wallsend shipyard worker, let’s be honest – being touted as the potential star. As Plater says, he had been thinking more along the lines of Eric Burdon or Alan Price.
The story begins with the hapless operator using his crane to lower a rose down to the office window of the woman he is trying to impress. A few smashed windows later, they both get the sack. There follows a chain of chaotic sequences detailing their courtship, and their search for employment and housing, all the while being pursued and judged by the forces of law and order – represented rather cartoonishly by a police marching band who have a habit of getting in their way.
A hallmark of the script I’ve seen is its highly specific references to Tyneside settings, including the Wallsend shipyards, the Newcastle quayside area, St James’ Park football stadium and the Jarrow tunnel. The story ends with the lovers, and assorted other characters, sailing up the mouth of the Tyne to sea in a fleet of small boats. Had ‘Xanadu’ been made, it may have stolen some thunder from the late Mike Hodges’ Get Carter (1972), widely regarded as the definitive North-East film of the era.
We’re getting into dangerous counterfactual territory here, but it’s interesting to speculate how Plater’s more whimsical and ultimately optimistic representation of Tyneside might have dove-tailed with Hodges’s famously bleak and nihilistic account of urban and moral decay. Well into the next decade, Plater was still hawking the screenplay around. In the Plater archive, there’s a polite rejection from the late director/critic Gavin Millar saying that he’s read the script but can’t really see how he could make it work on screen (the memo is undated, but I’m deducing it’s from the late 1980s).
The script I’ve seen for ‘Xanadu/Bobby Dazzlers’ clarifies that it was based on a joint idea by Plater and Alex Glasgow, who was also the composer of its songs. Of the various musical collaborators that Plater worked with over his career, the Gateshead-born singer-songwriter Glasgow was surely his most significant sidekick of the 1960s and 1970s. I would confess to having a long-time interest in Glasgow, stemming in part from a tentative personal connection: some years ago my wife was part of a musical group that had been co-founded by him and a group of school-pals in the 1950s.
These days, Glasgow is probably best remembered for two things in particular. Firstly, as the singer and arranger of the theme tune for the classic Tyneside-set period drama When The Boat Comes In (1976-81), and secondly for the songs he wrote for Close the Coalhouse Door. In the obituary he wrote about Glasgow in The Guardian, Plater observed that some of those songs had slipped so quickly and seamlessly into the folk canon, that many have presumed them to be of much older vintage.
Indeed, if you put Glasgow’s name into YouTube today, you’ll find numerous performances of his songs, and some uploads of the compilation albums he recorded in the 1970s, but absolutely no footage of the man himself. In his Guardian obit, Plater doesn’t skate over the fact that Glasgow was ‘highly principled and wonderfully combative’, deliberately resisting the curation of a public image, and refusing to appear on popular TV variety shows. Had he been more pliant, maybe he would be better known today, perhaps as a kind of Geordie Jake Thackray (whose reputation has been boosted recently by a new biography and DVD release).
Whilst there certainly weren’t any ‘specials’, of the equivalent to Thackray’s programmes anyway, Glasgow did do it his way with an episode for The Camera and The Song entitled ‘The Tyne Slides By’ (1972), which was a suite of visually illustrated songs about the life cycle of a Tyneside shipyard worker. I’ve not been able to get hold of it, but the songs are included on the second side of his 1973 ‘Songs of Alex Glasgow’ album – which happily is on some streaming services, alongside his other recordings from the decade.
I would imagine that Plater and Glasgow first crossed paths professionally on the BBC radio series The Northern Drift, an anthology of new creative writing from the North of England, which was compiled by Plater. The programme began in 1964, very soon into Plater’s TV/radio career, and whilst the Radio Times information (via Genome) doesn’t always include a list of contributors, those that do always mention Glasgow – I’ve heard it said elsewhere that he was the in-house musical performer throughout.
From 1968 onwards, The Northern Drift continued without Plater, who was by now working with Glasgow on Close the Coalhouse Door – which first appeared on stage in 1967, and then in a filmed version for TV the following year. Glasgow extended his commitment to The Northern Drift brand name, however. He was involved in the TV spin-off Get the Drift (1971-76), and he and Henry Livings released a Northern Drift album in 1978 based on their stage show of ‘favourite songs and sketches from their award-winning BBC radio and television programmes’.
Plater and Glasgow maintained their working relationship over the next decade. Stage work included the controversial Simon Says!, an anti-establishment entertainment that ruffled feathers as the opening show for the newly opened Leeds Playhouse in 1970. They collaborated too on the biographical On your Way, Riley (1982) about the music-hall performer Arthur Lucan and his wife Kitty McShane – although the TV version broadcast in 1985 removed the songs.
For TV, Glasgow provided songs for Trinity Tales (1975) and For The Love of Albert (1977) – and one of the most memorable scenes of Plater’s big-screen adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy involves a character giving a rendition of the innuendo-riven ‘Keep Your Hand On Your Ha’penny’ – one of Glasgow’s witty pastiches. As a side-note, Glasgow also took a slight left-turn into dramatic writing – not only providing scripts for When the Boat Comes In, but for the ITV period drama Flambards (1979), which Plater also contributed to, and oversaw as script-editor.
Going back to ‘Xanadu/Bobby Dazzlers’, it looks like a few of the songs that Glasgow penned for it were salvaged and used elsewhere. I couldn’t see any lyrical reference to ‘Xanadu’ in the script I looked at, but in Abandoned Projects, Plater includes excerpts from the version of this apparent title song that appeared on Glasgow’s 1978 ‘Songs of Alex Glasgow Three’ album. Another salvaged song, ‘The Harlequin’, appeared on the 1975 ‘Songs of Alex Glasgow Two’ compilation, but it was also re-used by Plater in his autobiographical 2001 stage play Tales From the Backyard, devised for the Newcastle-based Live Theatre company. Tales From the Backyard was conceived as a celebration of his childhood in Jarrow, yet it was also a commemoration of sorts to the recently deceased Glasgow, whose songs were sprinkled throughout the show.
I saw Backyard at the time, and distinctly remember its lovely opening number, ‘Sally Wheatley’, which was an old song by the famed Tyneside music-hall composer Joe Wilson, set to a new melody by Glasgow. It had been written for Glasgow’s 1971 stage show Joe Lives!, which was a celebration of Wilson starring John Woodvine – an actor who famously crops up across almost the entire of Plater’s career, from the early days of Z-Cars in the 1960s to his final work for TV, Joe Maddison’s War (2010). To complete this particularly convoluted circle, Woodvine also appeared in Tales From the Backyard, playing none other than Plater himself.
If you’re into your folk music, particularly that of the North East of England, you’ve likely come across Glasgow’s version of ‘Sally Wheatley’. I recently heard a podcast where Kate Rusby, arguably one of the most famous singers on the contemporary English folk scene, described an interpretation of it by Tyneside singer Bob Fox as ‘the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard’. She made no reference to Glasgow, though, thus with the inference that it was a ‘traditional’ song – hence proving Plater’s point, mentioned above, about how Glasgow rarely got his due as a composer.
I’m pushing the analogy a bit, but there’s a vague similarity here between how Glasgow has often been overlooked, and Plater’s own self-aware status as a writer whose ‘greatest hits’ were adaptations of other writers. To return to the counter-factual stuff, let’s imagine for a moment that Xanadu (or Bobby Dazzlers) got financed and made as a movie in the 1970s, or possibly for TV in the 1990s. Would it now be getting the reverential BFI blu-ray/reissue treatment, like Get Carter, or would it be the kind of half-forgotten Brit curio that occasionally crops up on Talking Pictures TV, exciting comment only from the hardcore of UK film/TV history nerds like, well, you and me? And above all, had Plater and Glasgow said yes to a starring role for Cliff Richard, what kind of impact might this have had on all their career trajectories and how they are remembered today?
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