MENTAL HEALTH INTERVIEWS - Bournemouth University
Alan Plater
It’s my privilege tonight to welcome you to the Inaugural Lecture of the Media School’s first Visiting Professor in Screenwriting. Professor Alan Plater is a northerner. Born in Jarrow, brought up in Hull, he trained as an architect in Newcastle. He’s been a full time writer since 1961 with over 200 assorted credits in television, theatre, film and radio, not to mention novels and journalism.
His television career began with a string of single plays as well as contributions to the ground breaking ‘Z Cars’ police series, set on Merseyside where he began a long association with somebody I’m very pleased to see here tonight, our external examiner, David Rose. For those of you who weren’t around at the time, ‘Z Cars’ was one of those series that defined the changes taking place in British society in the early ‘60s that reminded the south of the existence of the north.
The list of credits that followed over the years is awesome. Plays like ‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, movies like the ‘Virgin and the Gypsy’, television, ‘Softly, Softly’, ‘The Barchester Chronicles’, the ‘Biedebeker’ trilogy, ‘Fortunes of War’,‘A Very British Coup’, ‘The Last of the Blonde Bombshells’. For radio a Sony Award in 1983, an international Emmy, a Grand Prix of the Banff Festival in Canada, the Golden Fleece of Georgia. A veritable embarrassment of honours.
To my regret the only time I met Professor Plater in my broadcasting career, as a BBC executive, was at my very, very first union negotiation in the 1980s. I was much in awe of this, by then, legendary figure and what I really wanted to ask him about was his work as a writer. What he needed to explain to me and my fellow suits was that writers don’t survive merely on thin air and hero worship. His work for the Writers’ Guild at that time and later as president has been as a major defender and supporter and protagonist of creator’s rights.
Here’s the only piece of Professor Plater’s work I’ll dare to quote tonight. “Brandish phrases like ‘Moral Rights’ or ‘Intellectual Property’ within sniffing distance of the corporate suits and they head straight for the words ‘Rights’ and ‘Property’, which in their world equal money. The rationale is that they need total ownership of every dot, comma and crotchet, to operate in the free market place. The working principle of thieves throughout history. The simple truth is that our bread and butter is a thin layer of icing on the corporate cake and the cyberspace revolution actually makes it easier, not harder, to pay the creators their fair share.
Tonight’s Inaugural Lecture is called ‘Forty years hard and no remission’. Now I looked up remission in the dictionary this afternoon, because in the academic world it has its own particular meaning. But the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1951 edition, describes remission as forgiveness of sins or pardon. Nobody lets writers off writing. They’re known to be hard cases. There’s no forgiveness for talent that sets its own standards. So all I can say in welcoming Professor Plater at this, his Inaugural Lecture, is that we’re grateful that he’s prepared, yet again, as he’s done before, to share his thoughts about the craft and, as he puts it, occasional low cunning of screenwriting with us, with others who plan to tread the same winding path. Vice Chancellor, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Professor Alan Plater.
Thank you Roger. After an introduction like that I can hardly wait to hear what I’m going to say really. It’s lovely to be here at that stage in life when it’s lovely to be anywhere. I’ve written this down, look, I’m going to .. a little confession, there will be a few confessions tonight. My late great friend Henry Livings, the playwright, once caught me reading a lecture at the Nottingham Arts Festival in about 1969 or 70 and he said ‘That was a very good lecture, take those pages away and burn them.’ And I said ‘Why is that Henry?’ and he said ‘Because you’ll end up believing it all.’ But tonight, because I felt it was appropriate to the occasion, I’ve written it all out. So, I do believe it.
My first television play was screened in October 1962, almost 40 years ago. Harold MacMillan was Prime Minister, the top selling single was ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados and there were teams in the football league called Accrington Stanley, Bradford Park Avenue and Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic. On top of all that excitement the world was bracing itself for possible extinction because of a little local difficult called the Cuban missile crisis. My play was called ‘The Referees’ and had nothing to do with football.
It was recorded at the old Dickinson Road studio of the BBC in Manchester. The studio, originally a church later became the Headquarters of Mancunian Films, creators of epic movies starring great men like George Formby, Sandy Powell and Frank Randell. There was a ten day gap between the play’s recording and transmission and this is where the Cuban missile crisis comes into the tale. The play was finished and I was walking along Dickinson Road to the hotel where I was staying. This hotel is worth a play in itself. It was used mainly by commercial travellers who all had the desperate demeanour of Willy Loman and it was run by a woman who claimed to be Elia Kazan’s niece. Is it any wonder my work comes out wacky at times. But the serious point is this. As I was walking home, I prayed with all the fervour of a devout atheist to any God who might be out there and paying attention, and the gist of the prayer was ‘Go ahead, let them drop the bomb and destroy the planet Earth if they must. But make them wait until after the play is shown. If I’m going to be incinerated, let it be with one television credit.’
Now the simple fact of life hiding inside that anecdote, every play you write is the most important event that has happened in the entire history of the human race and, simultaneously, it doesn’t matter a damn. If you can’t live with that contradiction, don’t bother even trying to be a writer. That’s why most of the best playwrights are Irish or Jewish. They get along fine with contradictions of any kind. For the record my grandfather was Irish, that was his ring, and my wife is Jewish. The same applies, obviously, to painting pictures or making music.
I’ve written five novels over the years and, while working on them, tried to keep away from libraries and bookshops. One look at those shelves and you’re bound to say ‘Why bother writing another book?’ And I know there are hundreds of plays in the world but the don’t sit in rows looking at you to check whether you’re wearing any clothes. So let’s call that fact of life No. 1. Writing a play is an act of extraordinary arrogance and in the broad sweep of history, totally irrelevant.
Fact of Life No. 2. These are not in order of priority by the way but in the order they occur in the story. No. 2 is this. A playwright cannot exist without a patron. Indeed you could write a very persuasive history of the arts based on the influence of patrons on the process. I believe John Berger pointed out that the tradition of landscape painting in this country stemmed in part from the needs of Lords and landowners to assert their territorial rights, in oils, on canvas, and by implication keep the peasants in their place.
In that respect my generation of television playwrights was lucky. Our principal patron was the BBC, aided and abetted by a fledgling commercial television network created with a public service principal at its heart. This public service principal being totally democratic in intention was naturally later demolished by Margaret Thatcher and New Labour shows few signs of restoring it. But I was even luckier. My patron was the BBC North Region at a time when it had genuine autonomy. Even better the patronage came in the form of a single human being, the late Vivien Daniels. Vivien produced and directed eight plays a year working from the Dickinson Road studio. One every six weeks. I once mentioned this in a Radio 4 interview and apparently a very senior executive, not dissimilar to Alan Yentob as a matter of fact, phoned the programme in question to question what I’d said. He apparently couldn’t believe that the north of England could ever have been trusted to make plays without reference to important chaps like him in London. But we were and we did. And much the same thing happened in Glasgow, Belfast and Cardiff and, later on, in Birmingham.
Fact of Life No. 3 therefore is a quote, another quote, from my old friend Henry Livings. Distance from Headquarters adds enchantment. Henry was another writer who flourished under the patronage of Vivien Daniels. Now we have to put all this in the industrial context of the times. In the 1960s there were two, sometimes three plays on each channel every week. That adds up to over 200 original plays per year. There was neither the time, the will, nor the necessity for extensive rewrites. The process was simple, quick and cheap. When I was writing for ‘Z Cars’ I would deliver a script and it would be shown live on screen six weeks later. These days it takes six weeks for anyone to return a phone call.
It should also be acknowledged that not all the plays were good. No civilisation has yet produced 200 memorable plays in a year and ours was no exception. But the more work that is produced, as in Elizabethan England, the better the chances that work of high quality will emerge. Kingsley Amis was wrong. More means better. It was in many respects a cottage industry. Let me show you Exhibit A. This is the opening of a play called ‘A Smashing Day’ first shown on BBC TV on 1963 and the earliest surviving example of my work. You’ve got to look very hard, it’s a minute and fifteen seconds and it’s mostly in total darkness, but try hard.
[Film clip]
These little bits I’m going to show you are like trial boards, test boards. You find you make a big hole in the ground and that tells you what’s in the whole of the terrain roundabout. I don’t know if you were able to identify the actors but one was the late John Thaw doing one of his early jack-the-lad performances and the other is Alfred Lynch, a lovely actor called Alfred Lynch. Alfred played the central character, Lenny. A crumpled young man with the soul of a poet. A recurring figure in my early plays. 25 years later he became Trevor Chaplin in the ‘Beiderbeck’ series. I always deny any autobiographical tendency in this phenomenon, but you may wish to say ‘Ho, hum’. Here are one or two reflections of the homespun nature of what we’ve seen. We saw only two captions, the title and the author. The unique part is that I made them myself. I’d originally trained as an architect as Roger mentioned in the long shadow of the Bowes Arts tradition when it was assumed that you couldn’t .. you wouldn’t be able to design a decent bungalow if you couldn’t do Roman lettering. And I’d muttered quietly about the captions for two earlier plays whereupon Vivien said ‘If you don’t like the captions, why don’t you do your own?’ So I did in white poster paint on black card because that’s how we did it. We put the card on a little rostrum, the camera looked at it, took it away, next one. So I made those captions. Then the music you heard happened in a similar homespun way. I’d recently bought an EP of the .. EPs they were lovely, sweet things, of a piece called ‘The Back Country Suite’ by the American blues, piano player and singer, Mos Allison. And I said to Vivien it would make an interesting piece of music for the intro, ‘Bring it along to the studio’ he said ‘let’s try it.’ And that’s how opening sequences were made.
The play was well liked when it was shown, got me my first rave notice. So much so that I know it by heart. ‘The voice of Coronation Street and the spirit of Chekov.’ Well worth learning. And in the world of two black and white channels it was number 7 in the ratings. Not that anyone bothered about ratings in those days. Funny old fashioned creatures that we were, we bothered about the plays and how we made them.
They were shot entirely in the studio, that was the deal. You were given this large empty space and invited to fill it with your imagination. In practical terms this usually meant about eight interior settings and a couple of corners. Filming was a luxury and required a note from the Headmaster. But there was no limit to what could be achieved if you trusted the imagination of the playmakers and of the audience. I wrote a half hour play called ‘See the Pretty Lights’, all of which took place on the end of a seaside pier, at night. We built the end of the pier, aided by false perspective and a cyclorama of the seashore, in the background. It worked.
Now several factors worked in our favour. We were using black and white which is essentially dramatic and we were working with in-house technicians. We had people working on lighting, sound and cameras who knew the Dickinson Road Studio inside out and what could be achieved. Which was, frequently, the impossible. The writers were trusted and, crucially, we trusted the audience.
What followed over the years was entirely predictable. Dickinson Road was abandoned and replaced by a new all mod cons studio officially designated ‘Not suitable for Drama’. The North Region Drama Unit had ceased to exist and Vivien Daniels moved on and was never replaced. Of course a few years later the new studio was redesignated as suitable for drama because the studios at Television Centre in London were full. So, in effect, Manchester then became an overflow facility for London. I’m sure there’s another Fact of Life lurking there somewhere but it would be too depressing to spell it out.
Let me move on to Exhibit B and happier times. I’m doing these quotes at roughly ten year intervals. So ten years have passed, by plus a couple. It’s 1974 and David Rose who originally .. the original producer of ‘Z Cars’ is now at Pebble Mill in Birmingham with a title Head of Drama (English Regions). He became my principle patron. In that role he gave television debuts to people as diverse as Alan Bleasdale and Mike Lee and dozens of others. David encouraged me to write ‘Trinity Tales’. A six part series inspired by Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’. In our version the pilgrims are travelling to Wembley for the Rugby League Cup Final where their team, Trinity, is playing. The characters and the stories are all based on Chaucer’s originals. ‘The Wife of Bath’ for example became ‘The Wife of Battley’. On the journey they tell stories, also based on Chaucer’s original tales. Here are the opening titles and part of the prologue.
[Film clip]
You’ll observe again .. sorry about that .. that the only credit was mine. Alan Plater’s ‘Trinity Tales’. The writing credit was repeated at the end along with the acting and technical credits. In the late ‘70s I showed ‘Trinity Tales’ at a writing workshop in Toronto and that was what impressed them most, that the writer could have front and back credits. It would have been impossible in North America even then and it is impossible anywhere now. Francis Matthews played the prologue. He spoke a linking narrative throughout the series in rhyming couplets, frequently addressed directly to the camera, inviting the audience to take part in the conspiracy that is the root of all drama. We had original songs and music by Alex Glasgow and the actors playing the pilgrims also played the characters in the stories within the journey. But even that wasn’t complicated enough for us. We also did a stage version with the same Company at the Birmingham Rep which broke the existing House records prior to shooting the television series.
Now, even from that brief extract, it’s clear that only ten years on from ‘Smashing Day’ we have moved on quite dramatically. The series was a blend of traditional studio scenes and location filming which was no longer a luxury for special occasions. I also recall that Pebble Mill had just taken delivery of an early lightweight video camera and we used that for all the scenes in the minivan, which the pilgrims used for their journey to London. That was very much in the spirit of the times. ‘Here’s a new thing, let’s try it and see what happens.’ The show overall has a jolly rough hewn quality that’s all of a piece with the material.
I’ve talked about it at some length for one very simple reason. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a project being made today. In retrospect it seemed clear to me that the 1970s represented the peak of television drama in this country from the writer’s point of view. And that is the only one I’ve got. There’s still a treasure chest of material at Pebble Mill made under David Rose’s benevolent patronage that would hold its own on the networks today. It was drama made with more imagination to the square foot than anything we see nowadays. It seems odd that while comedy shows from the ‘70s are repeated regularly and, in the case of ‘Dad’s Army’ and the ‘Likely Lads’ they’ll always be welcome, drama rarely gets a showing. Apart from Mike Lee’s wonderful ‘Nuts in May’ I can’t remember seeing anything from David’s Pebble Mill period in the last 15 years. A David Rudkin retrospective wouldn’t be a bad start. Incidentally David Rose’s post, Head of Drama (English Region’s) disappeared long and the Pebble Mill studio became a valuable piece of real estate.
Now lurking in this story so far is a significant and in some ways lethal technical change. The move from the studio to outside locations. The last traditional studio play I wrote was in 1984 and in a way it told its own story. It was called ‘Thank you Mrs Clinkscales’ and was a more or less autobiographical account of a New Year’s party held in the early ‘50s by a gang of lads on the cusp between sixth form and university. One of the lads brings a girl with him, a sure sign that the world is changing, and it’s the last time the gang will ever assemble. That’s the story. The bones of it are true but I played a few games with the flesh. The setting was a terraced house on the outskirts of Hull. The play was produced by Yorkshire Television and the designer travelled over one day to look at the real house where the party had taken place so he could build an accurate replica in the studio. Now, in the event, the house next door was empty, identical and for sale. The sale price was £12,000, exactly the same as the cost of building the studio replica. Now even we could spot the contradiction. Studio sets, once the show was over, were destroyed. Though there was at least poverty stricken theatre in Yorkshire with an unofficial licence to raid the Yorkshire Television rubbish dump at regular intervals. I know this because I helped to negotiate the deal.
The lethal part of this transformation was the change in emphasis on the respective roles of writer and director. A sixty minute studio play was generally shot in two days. The writer sat in the gallery with the grown ups and was able to keep an eye on deviations from the text and the intentions of the piece. A sixty minute film is shot in bits and pieces on a variety of locations over a period of two or three weeks and the writer has the choice either to be an obsessive neurotic and sit on the director’s shoulder the whole time or to stay at home where it’s warm and trust the director to get it right. I’ve always opted for the latter, not least because film making is one of the most boring activities ever invented by the human race. Hours of tedium punctuated by bacon sandwiches and spasms of collective neurosis. Jack Rosenthal’s ‘Ready when you are Mr McGill’ tells you all you need to know about film making.
I keep coming back to the word trust. Drama in any form is a collective enterprise. We have to trust each other’s talent. This attitude is probably at its peak in the theatre and it’s worth pointing out that most of the key players in the television drama of the ‘60s and ‘70s had a theatrical background, either as actors, directors or both. They brought with them a respect for text and a respect for each other’s talent. There was a downside too. Some of the older actors who had spent a lifetime in weekly rep, speaking up so they could be heard at the back of the gallery, found the new challenge of playing to a camera six feet away an awkward transition. In the words of the old comedians ‘Nobody sleeps while I’m on.’ But that was all part of the package. We can only behave according to the norms of our own generation.
But I think there was another aspect of that generation that is always overlooked in this debate. We were all children of the Second World War. Robert Barr who wrote episodes for ‘Z Cars’ and ‘Softly Softly’ had been a BBC war correspondent and most of the senior positions in broadcasting were filled by people, mostly men it has to be said, who had seen active service. I know one key figure who had flown bombing missions over Germany. That being so he was not likely to be frightened by a strong memo from a Channel Controller and he wasn’t. And I’ve always believed that one of the central ingredients of British television in the ‘60s and ‘70s was fearlessness bordering at times on recklessness. And if writers are to do their best work, we need brave patrons in high places.
Now let’s move on another decade to 1987 and ‘Fortunes of War’, a seven part dramatisation of Olivia Manning’s six novels about the Second World War. Now, even as I speak those words, I can feel the old contradiction rearing its head. If there were six novels why not six episodes? Well, quite so. When the project was first mooted I reacted in the obvious way ‘Let’s make six films and if they come out at different lengths why should that be a problem?’ My old English teacher used to say ‘Say what you’ve got to say and then stop.’
So that was my pitch to the BBC and after all Olivia Manning was under no obligation to make her books the same length and the BBC as a public service channel should be able to offer the same freedom. As unanswerable logic the answer was ‘No’. The BBC was looking for seven hour long episodes that could be sold around the world in an attractive package and that was the end of the argument. My task was to transform over 1600 pages of paperback into seven hours of television. How did I do it? Well the most interesting answer is ... very quickly. I spent about two hours .. two months .. that let it out won’t it. I spent about two months working on the narrative structure of the piece in association with Betty Willingale, the Producer, and then, wait for it, I delivered a script every week for 21 weeks. I subsequently did further tweaking and polishing but 90% of what appeared on screen was in those first drafts.
Now there’s a vogue at the moment saying good screenplays are not written but rewritten. No writer said that and no writer believes it. The first draft will always be the best because that’s when the passion is at its highest. Let’s look at the opening of ‘Fortunes of War’ then I’ll draw one or two more weighty conclusions.
[Film clip]
I love that tune, top tune. Now you don’t have to be a seasoned professional to make the obvious comment about what we’ve just seen. It must have cost a fortune. And it did. The overall budget was, I think, six million pounds, the most expensive series ever made by the BBC up to that point. The film director, Richard Lester, phoned me after the first episode saying, and I paraphrase, ‘Where did you get your money and may I have their telephone number?’ The other obvious comment is that it’s a terrific piece of filmmaking, as was the whole series. Three people are named in the credits, Betty Willingale, our Director, James Kethlan-Jones and me. We all trusted each other implicitly . We were, and remain, preachers of the old school.
It’s also interesting to note that our stars, Ken Brannagh and Emma Thompson, didn’t get star billing at the top of the show, even though they deserved it. Another Fact of Life. I was now living and working on a different planet from the one that gave us ‘A Smashing Day’. No longer was I making my own caption cards and turning up at the studio with a record that might be suitable to play over the opening titles, for all practical purposes, we were now making movies. We were making things to last. I think it was Orson Wells who pointed out that ‘Film lasts forever because it comes in cans’. And that has to be kept in mind when bandying figures like six million pounds around the debating chamber.
Old style television like ‘A Smashing Day’ was designed to be seen once only. The normal way of preserving it was by a technique called tele-recording which involved pointing a film camera at the television screen as the programme was transmitted and literally filming the result. It was cumbersome, expensive and technically messy, but that’s how most vintage programmes survived. If they did. But if you spend millions of pounds on a programme with a long life there is at least a theoretical possibility of getting some of it back over the years by way of sales around the world, repeat transmissions on the proliferating channels that now girdle the earth and from video, DVD and whatever they invent next week. Profits, I’m told, are not unknown. I have to confess I’m not consumed with any great urgency to see the long term balance sheets of shows I’ve worked on. But seen from my small corner, it’s obvious that money is made over a period. For example ‘Barchester Chronicles’ which had been made 20 years ago, has, to date, sold getting on for 60,000 copies on video in the UK alone.
It’s good to think that your work, instead of being seen once and then instantly forgotten might have some sort of permanent existence on the shelf of local video store and theoretically anyway in the hearts and minds of the nation. But what we have lost is what we had in those early innocent days. The shortest possible route to the audience. The idea of a multi-million dollar cottage industry is a contradiction in terms.
Now let’s examine a multi-million dollar project. My film ‘The Last of the Blonde Bombshells’ seen on BBC in the year 2000 starring Dame Judy Dench in an award winning performance, that being the only sort Judy is capable of, along with Sir Ian Holm, Dame Cleo Lane and a number of commoners including Olympia Dukarkis, Billy Whitelaw, June Whitfield, Lesley Carron and the late and much lamented Joan Simms. A shameful confession. When people ask me how we assemble such a brilliant cast, I say ‘We sent them the screenplay.’ But you’ll forgive me. Let’s look at the opening sequence and I will make a resolute effort to behave like a Professor.
[Film clip]
Even a superficial study of those opening titles shows how dramatically the industry has changed over 40 years. Up front we have the names of various production companies who put up the money, which was eventually was about three and a half million pounds. But it’s even more complicated than that. At the time of shooting, Working Title who were our UK based independent producers, Working Title was owned by Polygram, who was owned by Universal, which was owned by Seegram, suppliers of hard liquor to the planet Earth. So that being so I didn’t even suggest making my own caption cards. Judy and Ian have their names above the title which doesn’t worry me as it was their loyalty to the project that focused the minds of the men with access to global capital. Then we have all the other star names plus the main technical credits and nestling cozily among them the Director and Writer. That doesn’t worry me either. This is not about vanity. Many highly talented people worked on the film and they should receive proper credit. The question is why do it at the start of the film when we really want to get on with the story. The complication is this, BBC thinking based, no doubt, on extensive research with focus groups borrowed from the political parties between elections, determines that end credits should run no longer than 90 seconds. Any longer than that we’re all likely to start zapping to ITV, Channel 4 or even Channel 5 and it’s obviously a very short step from that to the downfall of civilisation as we know it. In any case the end credits these days are generally squeezed into one side of the screen while we are shown a trailer for the next programme with a breathless and over exited voice over in estuary English. One solution to these interlocking problems is to put the chunk of credits at the beginning. Hence the pre-title sequence. A bit of story to get us interested and desperate to know what happens next. Now I have no serious qualms about pre-title sequences. They’ve been around a long time and I’ve written a few halfway decent ones over the years, but always on purpose. This one was retrospective, part of the tiresome process called solving it in the edit. Now if I sound a little world-weary about the whole business let me put it in context. The project took twelve years to get on screen. It started life as a sixty minute segment for a series initiated by Jack Rosenthal. A series that never happened. I expanded the story, rewrote it as a feature film, at which point Judy and Ian committed themselves to it. We came quite close to making it in this form but fell at the last fence. Then Working Title heard about it, read it, liked it. The net result of all this from the point of view of my desk and my fingers, is that over the twelve year period I wrote about fourteen versions of the screenplay. According to the computer I wrote seven drafts for the version we eventually made. During the immediate pre-production period extensive notes on the screenplay were arriving from at least three different directions. At script meetings I would say with all the fervour I could muster by this stage ‘Listen, the first draft is always the best, because that’s the one you write with maximum passion and curiosity. And if you don’t believe me, David Mannet says so. So it must be true.’ And they would reply ‘We hear what you’re saying Alan.’ I hate the phrase ‘We hear what you’re saying’. What it means is that they’re hearing it but they’re not listening and they’re going to pay no attention whatsoever. ‘We hear what you’re saying, but if you’d just look at these few scenes’. And then the notes would be piled up. The silly part is, in all these pre-shooting meetings about the screenplay, they ignored something that actually mattered. The story is set in London and the Home Counties. I gave very specific directions about the geography of the tale. But when the film was completed the Americans looked at it and said ‘How will the audience in the States know that this is London?’ At their behest, and to be fair at their expense, additional shooting took place, including that shot of Judy getting out of a taxi in Trafalgar Square. Now the absolute logic of what we just saw, the semi-ottics if you’ll pardon me using such a word, is that the National Gallery is being converted into a skating rink, but we’ll set that aside. The nonsense is that nobody at the proper stage said, ‘Could we have a couple of shots that say this is London to the archetypal farming family in the mid-west?’ and it would have been a sensible use of our time and I could have solved the problem easily. The heart of the matter is that I don’t think these re-writes made the film any better. If some scholar with more time than sense were to study all the versions, he or she would I’m sure reach much the same conclusion. Institutionalised re-writing in general is a symptom of fear and a lack of the mutual trust without which I keep harping on about, the business of drama simply cannot function. In no sense am I disowning the film. On the contrary I’m proud of what we achieved. The key performances are terrific and the recreation of a wartime dance hall as good as anything I’ve ever seen in any movie. But I also believe there are flaws in the piece that would have been avoided by more trust and less insecurity in the front office. A footnote to the whole business. I’m currently writing a stage version of ‘The Last of the Blonde Bombshells’ and my first step is to read all the earlier versions and then burn them. Now I should apologise for the unrelenting winges and moans that have informed so much of what I have said but if you invite any professional writer to preach at you, moaning is what you will get. I believe it was the great V S Pritchard who said ‘Writers don’t ask for much. Most of them would settle for a million pounds a year and the Order of Merit.’ By way of compensation I would like to offer a few thoughts on the future of television drama. Thoughts which might, in a good like, be considered constructive. I’ll pick up on my earlier theme of the facts of life since you’re never alone with a motif.
1. Television must dump it’s obsessions with ratings.
Earlier this year there was a hiatus with the technology which means that nobody knows how many people watched, for example, ‘Shackleton’. Therefore according to what passes for thinking in the industry, nobody will ever know whether it was any good or not. The key question is whether in five, ten, fifteen years time, people will still want to watch it. If the current obsession had been operating thirty years ago, ‘Monty Python’, to take a random example, would have been dumped after the first series.
2. The industry needs to give serious thought to the apprenticeship writers serve.
And by this I mean something more coherent than Radio Times competitions and, God help us, talent initiatives. Over the last fifteen years I’ve done teaching stints everywhere from Australia to Norway. I might even be invited to Bournemouth soon. A parenthetical word about teaching. I don’t believe writing can be taught. But a good teacher can help the writer to learn more quickly. In the words of Mark Twain ‘I remember everything I ever learned but nothing I was ever taught.’ In the course of these teaching adventures there’s nothing more exciting than finding a bright new original talent. And nothing more depressing than seeing that same talent, a couple of years down the line, flattened out for the purposes of a soap opera or long run precinct drama. I mean can any of us really imagine Dennis Potter, David Mercer and Alan Owen writing for ‘Eastenders’ or ‘Brookside’ or at the same time. But I hear you object. ‘Didn’t Jack Rosenthal write for ‘Coronation Street’ and didn’t you write for ‘Z Cars’?’ Well yes we did. But in the process we were encouraged to write like ourselves. One of my treasured memories is of going to football matches in Hull during the sixties and people saying to me ‘I saw your ‘Z Cars’ last night. I could tell it was one of yours.’ Frank Windsor who starred in ‘Z Cars’ and later in ‘Softly, Softly’ told me that he could tell who had written each script by the shape of the dialogue on the page. The decline in true original drama on television and by this I don’t simply mean the single play or film, is a disgrace. And doubly so because it has been a deliberate policy. Indeed one of the beneficiaries has been the theatre. A whole generation of young writers who a generation ago would have headed straight for the Wednesday Play have chosen to write in the theatre where you have the liberty of poverty and a tradition of trust. As I speak I have a play in performance at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. It’s called ‘Only a Matter of Time’ and it’s reached the theatre by way of the radio, God Bless Radio. But fifteen years ago I would have written that play for television.
3. We must learn to use technology rather than be used by it.
In the days before computers I delivered my script, a top copy and two carbons as laid down in the contract. It was then retyped and duplicated by the broadcasters who had typing pools, a large supply of stencils and the very latest in duplicating machinery. Rewrites were A: time-consuming, B: a nuisance and above all C: a charge on the company. They pay for rewriting scripts. The invention of the computer enabled them to sack the typing pools and switch the burden to the writer. The prime function of the computer, from the point of view of the broadcasters, is to give them an excuse not to make up their minds. Hence the endless rewriting about which I promise not to say another word because even I’m sick of talking about it.
4. We need to think more about the richness and diversity of human relationships.
In 1988 I sat in at a talk at the Australian Film School given by a Hollywood script doctor. She started her lesson by saying ‘Today we’re going to talk about relationships in drama. There are seven.’ She then listed them on the blackboard. I can’t remember what they all were except they ranged from the sexual to the cosmic. I can’t remember the five in the middle. I do remember asking her if you were allowed to have more than one at the same time. And she gave me a serious answer. When I got home to our apartment in down town Sydney I made a mental list of crucial relationships in my own life and I soon got past seven. Currently the list might include marital, filial, parental, grandparental, fraternal, sororial, social, economic, political, plus, as a native of Jarrow-on-Tyne, and therefore a de facto Celt, the relationship with that town and its industrial history. I have a daily relationship with the ghosts of my grandparents and their ancestors, with the football teams I’ve supported, the books I’ve read, the paintings I’ve gazed at, the music I’ve listened to, the work I do, the dreams I’ve shared, the dreams I’ve kept to myself and so on, literally ad infinitum. This is important because the majority of intelligent drama today seems to me to be dominated by personal and sexual relations to the almost total exclusion of anything else. We are presented with a cast of characters who then have sex with each other in various permutations. The soaps, almost by definition, have become dramatised gossip columns, punctuated by spasms of old style Victorian melodrama. Now oddly enough I’m in total sympathy with their predicament. If the system demands half an hour of instant drama every day you’re bound to reach for instant solutions. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking this is the real thing by specious arguments that if Dickens were alive today he would be writing for ‘Eastenders’. He would be part of a team along with George Elliott, Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollop. All under orders to remove any individuality from their work and that is the crux of the matter. And the real victims are the viewers.
5. Let’s think a little about the audience.
They at best are being short changed and at worst, betrayed. My good friend Jimmy Perry co-creator of ‘Dad’s Army’ has a very simple view on this. The network television audience, Jimmy claims, is aged 50 and over. In crude terms the teenagers and 20+s are either surfing the net or out clubbing and if they want to watch to television they rent a video from Blockbuster. The 30+s with young families are too knackered once the kids have gone to bed to care too much one way or another and will watch the least worst of what is available by 9.30 or 10 o’clock at night. And I’ve talked to my kids and they’ve confirmed the truth of this. It is the over 50s who have the time and space to discriminate and that’s why ‘Dad’s Army’ will always find an audience however often it’s transmitted. The television executives don’t want to believe this and disregard any evidence that supports this view. A couple of years ago I came across some audience research figures that showed the most popular sit-com still in production was Roy Clarke’s ‘Last of the Summer Wine’. Which actually remains one of the most consistently well written shows in the business. I also learned recently that the most popular day time sports coverage is indoor bowls. This might be pre curling of course. This is not what the front office wants to hear. Nor did they want to hear of the splendid viewing figures or prizes won by ‘A Rather English Marriage’, Jack Rosenthal’s ‘Eskimo Days’ or coming closer to home, ‘The Last of the Blonde Bombshells’ a project which by the way was turned by the ITV Network Centre. What the television executives want is cutting edge programming which presupposes an audience that wants to bleed for fun. There is one producer who is on the record as saying ‘I want a fuck or a fight in the first ten minutes’. There are programme makers around who, as a matter of deliberate policy, make trashy programmes distinguished by wall to wall buttocks and justify them by saying ‘Well, of course, they should be watched ironically’. Ergo they aren’t really trash. Well I was taught in school that if you have to explain something as ironic then it isn’t. What we now have in the industry is a centrally controlled culture that Joe Stalin himself would have envied. Any major drama proposal needs ultimate approval from the ITV Network Centre in London, the BBC in London, or Channel 4 in London. We may have a degree of political devolution, notably in Scotland, but culturally our parameters are drawn up in a fashionable West End restaurant and a couple of over-priced wine bars in Soho. The closest our decision makers get to the heartbeat of the nation is when they tip the waiter. The audience is something to be analysed demographically. Now historically this is a major change from the traditional situation in broadcasting. The BBC long operated on a liberal tradition forged and refined in Oxbridge. The establishment theatre still works this way. It was a tradition with the confidence to operate at arm’s length. It trusted Vivien Daniels in Manchester and David Rose in Birmingham to get on with the work and deliver the goods. ITV which was made in the image of the BBC operated in much the same way. For years I worked for Yorkshire Television and for Granada when they had genuine autonomy with no need to grovel to anyone in London. Northern writers, like their counterparts in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and elsewhere, were given regular access to the adventure playground though we were naturally kept well clear of the Senior Common Room. This changed dramatically under Margaret Thatcher who hated any kind of liberalism and democracy and introduced a set of moral values drawn up and codified in the corner shop in Grantham. So we can’t say we weren’t warned. Now we have New Labour who’s hidden agenda seems to be very simple. People, according to their analysis, find politics boring, therefore let’s take the politics out of politics. Or expressing it another way obfuscation, obfuscation, obfuscation. A friend of mine took three young actors to see a revival of Carol Church’s play ‘Top Girls’ and they were staggered to realise you could have an exciting play about politics. They hadn’t realised such a thing was possible. All this being so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the people running our industry are confused and frightened. We haven’t had any proper debates about what really matters in clear, unambiguous, jargon-free English since about 1979. So let me finish with a few clear, unambiguous, jargon-free proposals.
1. Let us remind the BBC that public service means placing the needs of the audience first.
Needs are not the same as wants.
2. Let us also remind ourselves that commercial broadcasting means placing the needs of the shareholders first. If we want commercial broadcasters to do more than that it has to be done by legislation. The market forces, left to themselves, have no conscience, otherwise they’re not market forces. I said as much to Gerald Kaufman’s Commons Committee on Broadcasting a few years ago when representing the Writers’ Guild. ‘The logical conclusion of deregulation is cricketers wearing pyjamas’ I said. I thought it would make a good sound bite for the journalists present but they’d already written their sound bites before they’d got there. Here are some practical proposals. When Channel 4 went on the air twenty years ago, David Rose started ‘Film on Four’. He commissioned twenty low budget films each year. This effectively transformed and possibly saved the British Film Industry. Channel 4 should do it again. In parallel the BBC and ITV, who are at least twice as rich as Channel 4, should commission forty films each, also low budget. The audience would over the years see a hundred new films, written by a range of writers from the young headbangers to the old lags, not forgetting the old headbangers. The films should tell stories from around the British Isles and simply to qualify should take us to places we’ve never been and tell us things we don’t know. I believe for example we all know how sex works and what buttocks look like and that we have a reasonable working knowledge of lawyers, doctors, detectives, disfunctional families and men having mid-life crises. We should remember, especially now, Spike Milligan’s dictum that clichés are a hand rail for the crippled imagination. I’d be wary myself of tales about sexual identity and writers going back to their roots even if they are working class. And while it’s good to see drama set outside of London and the Home Counties, does it always have to be Manchester. I mentioned ‘Nuts in May’ earlier, perhaps it’s time for another story set in Dorset. I’d also disqualify any script containing the lines ‘Jason we have to talk’ or ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ But this is a personal quirk. The decision making process on which films to make would be devolved to production bases equivalent to those we had twenty years ago. This might involve a degree of down-sizing among the apparachets[ph] in London but they could be put in charge of afternoon discussions and game shows. I’ve come this far without mentioning the phrase ‘golden age’ which has a tendency to muddle the debate. The main thing that made the sixties and seventies a golden age was that we were all young. To be sure we had the plays of Alan Owen, David Mercer and John Hopkins and many others, but we also had ‘Sale of the Century’, ‘3 - 2 - 1’ and ‘Crossroads’. Those who are young today will, I hope, look back on now as a golden age. But I also believe we have an inalienable right to look at what was of good report in a particular period and restore those principles because they worked. Not really a right, but a duty. Or to express it another way, any generation that hands on less than it inherited, is guilty of betrayal. We have stories to tell and an audience that needs to hear them. As they say in the cop shows ‘Let’s do it.’ Thank you for listening.
Hi, there is at least a very real possibility that you might be blaming the wrong people with your denunciations of the people in the front office. I’m wondering whether there is at least a possibility that .. I mean you mentioned, for example, the over 50s as being a vital audience, but of course if you look at the .. put yourselves in the ..you’re of course talking from a particular position, if you look at life from someone in those front offices, from a BBC executive for example, they have to worry not about those over 50s now, but about the people who are Thatcher’s children if you like. People who are .. who .. I guess we’re talking about people under 35, who did their formative years under the barren wilderness of the Thatcher Government. Now that means you could argue that we’ve a fundamentally different set of values, a fundamentally different society and they need to worry not about this upcoming Charter renewal but the Charter renewal after that. And if they’re producing great scripts which are in effect being ignored by these Thatcher’s children but being loved by the over 50s who are going to be dying out within the next 20 years, that’s going to leave them a serious demographic problem when it comes to the next Charter but one. Now that’s just real politic isn’t it? Aren’t we blaming the wrong people by blaming the people in the front office and shouldn’t we rather be blaming the people who created this sort of generation of Thatcher’s children, with very different values from those who like ‘Dad’s Army’?
Yeah, I mean I hear what you’re saying. Any minute now you’re going to tell me to start living in the real world I know. Yes I mean, yes, one is constantly meeting facts, little bits of information, anecdotes that stop you in your tracks. A few year’s back I spoke at a conference in Newcastle and met somebody who when I remembered her was the typist in the Student’s Union. And she used to do a lot of the typing for the student newspaper that I worked on at that time. And she explained that she was still working on the student newspaper but she said ‘These days they do it to put it on their CV.’ We didn’t have CVs. We didn’t know what a CV was. We’d never heard of such things. And obviously any writer writing honestly and truthfully, it will come out of his or her sensibility, whatever age. But what I think depresses the hell out of me is some of the real talents that I’ve met both at Arven and at various writing workshops, bright, original, lively writers and then I see their credit on ‘Eastenders’, ‘The Bill’, ‘Casualty’, and all that originality has been squeezed out of them. And I think to give them the kind of opportunities that they’re .. I would argue that they are entitled to, involves an act of will at the top or in those middle range positions. Now there is a real problem there that people are on short term contracts, so a producer on a short term contract at the BBC, or with a commercial company, who takes a chance on something and it bombs, is suddenly out of work. And I can’t solve that problem. The de-casualisation of the industry or the casualisation of the industry, whereby everybody’s a freelance now instead of just a few of us. Instead of just the actors, the writers and the musicians, if everyone’s freelance working with short term contracts then that kind of security is taken away. And I think one of the strengths of the BBC in the old days was the stability of people. That they wouldn’t be sacked if the programme didn’t do well. And these days people are punished. We’ve got an urge to punish. There are a lot of bullies in the system. And I suspect this .. I can’t speak for this campus but it certainly happens in other bits of the education sphere that we’ve gone for a strolling. It’s a big job and I don’t imagine for one minute that anyone would do this, that would put this manifesto into practice. But it’s so simple. It’s actually so simple to do what David did twenty years ago which, as I say, probably saved the British film industry and certainly kicked off the latest renaissance. We haven’t had a film renaissance for a year or two at that time and we like to have them fairly regularly. The thing is I’m not making a plea for the kind of plays we had twenty years ago. I mean we had a lot of plays about politics, things like ‘Stocker’s Copper’ and ‘The Burston Rebellion’ and Jim Allen’s work, extraordinarily political pieces. Bill Brand, Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand, I don’t think we need to revisit those areas of experience. I think the writer’s must write what they want to write but if you just think of it in terms of the geography of the British Isles. We spend quite a bit of time in the Orkneys. I’m doing a community based play this summer. Did one two years ago. We’ve been going up and down there for ten years. There are fascinating lives going on, stories to be told about the Orkneys. When did we last have a play about Cumbria or the North East other than Newcastle and Gateshead. I mean I’m even a little weary of seeing my beloved Newcastle on television in the wake of so many series set in the North East. This strange phenomenon that wherever the police are going or wherever Badger is going to investigate the latest criminal activity, it always involves going across the bridge that makes the right shot. They can look through the high level bridge and see the Tyne bridge beyond which is geographically a nonsense. There were several of those in ‘Billy Elliott’ as well. There are so many places. So many people with stories to tell around the place and we don’t hear them and all the stories seem to be about people having sex with each other inappropriately. I’m bored. And I think the audience is bored. Not this one. I think the television audience is getting very bored. And there are little .. there are bright things, I mean, Andy Hamilton’s ‘Bedtime’, a show that’s on tonight called ‘Manchild’ written by Nick Baker .. Nick .. Nick .. 10 o’clock BBC2. Nick Fisher, Nick Fisher. So I mean there are plenty of people that can write. That’s never been a problem and never will be a problem. There will always be plenty of talent around. But it’s getting the talent from outside out of the writer’s head onto that, to the audience as quickly as possible.
What are new writers to do?
Well when I do workshops and things and people ask this question I point them towards the radio and the theatre because you can still get original work done on radio and you still get original work done in the theatre. You won’t earn much of a living. But if you’re only concerned about money then you wouldn’t write drama anyway, you’d write advertising copy. And you can then make the sideways leap. Wait until you get to be famous in the theatre and then they can come and headhunt you. It’s a very simple statistic. If you do a breakdown of the number of one-offs on television per annum, the BAFTA long list of single shot for the benefit, for the purposes of voting for the awards fits on one sheet of paper, you know, about twelve, fourteen pieces of work some of which have crept under the fence and really have no right to be there. And the amount of original personal drama, and by this I mean things like ‘Cold Feet’ which has the stamp of the writer on it as a proportion of the overall is much too small because of the preponderance of soaps, straight ahead soaps and things like ‘Casualty’ and ‘Holby City’ which are de facto soaps, which can all be shot in the same place forever without having to build anything or travel anywhere. And it’s just this preponderance of instance drama. And you will learn a few skills working on these things. I mean I learnt a lot of skills working on ‘Z Cars’ and I would do outrageous things with the full support of the production team. Shall I tell the research stuff? The research story. The ‘Z Cars’ research story. When you join ‘Z Cars’, this is in 1963, part of the deal was you were sent to Liverpool, to Kirby, the real life model for the show, Kirby as we used to say, you’d go to Kirby. And I’d spent a night .. I wanted to do an episode about a night shift and spent a night with a couple of cops in their car driving around and nothing happened, absolutely nothing. They didn’t get a single call all night. So we went back to base for a tea break and the lads had a game of snooker and we’d stop on the East Lancs motorway, pull into a laybye, have a cigarette, tell some dirty jokes. I mean that was the shape of the night. And at the end of the shift I said to them, ‘Well thanks lads’ and one of them said ‘Well you should go away and write this one.’ I said ‘What one? There hasn’t been one.’ He said ‘The one where we have to stay alert and on our toes in case something happens in two minutes time.’ And I did. I went to David and to John Hopkins who was then the script editors ‘Chaps, I want to write this episode where nothing happens.’ And they said ‘But what happens?’ I said ‘Well that’s the point. Nothing happens.’ And I relayed the story of my research to Kirby and they said ‘Great, go away and do it.’ And I wrote this episode called ‘The Quiet Night’ which of the eighteen that I did is the one everyone remembers. So that’s the kind of freedom. I also did one .. we used to read each other’s scripts just to keep abreast of the output, which directions the show might be going in. And I realised that the great John Hopkins used to write scripts with about sixty studio scenes, sixty scenes in. This is a fifty minute show, shot in the studio. He was getting up to fifty, sixty scenes. And I thought if it’s possible to do that, to get to fifty, sixty scenes it should be possible to do the ton and I resolved to write a ‘Z Cars’ episode with 100 scenes in it. And I though, how am I going to do this? I obviously need several stories. So I thought I’ll have five stories and each one is told in twenty little chapters, which might be just somebody opening a door and saying ‘Hi Honey, I’m home.’ Accept it wouldn’t be that. And then cross cutting, you could have an episode with 100 scenes, and I did it and it had 103 studio scenes and about ten filmed inserts. And years later I was on a panel Banff, at the Banff Television Festival in Canada and I told this story and a woman called Georgia Jeffreys who had been a producer and story editor on ‘Cagney and Lacey’ said ‘Well in that case you invented ‘Hill Street Blues’ because ‘Hill Street’ always had five stories’. And one would drop off at the end of each episode and a new one would climb the board. And that was, as it were the ‘Hill Street’ formula, so I invented ‘Hill Street Blues’ and even Stephen Bochgale doesn’t know. So you can learn things working in the context of a long running series, but I think days, especially, it will suck you dry. So I think building a bit of a bank balance and then go away and do your own thing. Never forget who you are. There’s a dreadful story about the American screenwriters’ strike. Not the recent one that didn’t happen but they had a strike in ‘88, ‘89 when I think they were out for seven months. This is the Writers’ Guild of the America West based in Los Angeles. And this is anecdotal but I believe in anecdotal evidence. What would the writers do when they were on strike because they were not honouring their contracts. So they all said ‘I know what I will do, I will write the great original screenplay’ that they had been putting off for all these years. And they did their original screenplays and when the strike was settled all these originals were sent to the agents and almost entirely they were no good because they’d forgotten how to do it, they’d forgotten who they were. I pass that on. I don’t have any objective evidence to support that tale, but it was told me by an American screenwriter. And that’s the .. we lose our voices. You learn to colour in squares but you don’t learn to be an artist. And I suppose in a vague and flabby way we’re aspiring to the condition of making art and once in a while we do it.
To follow that up, we have students here who are coming, trying to enter an industry which exists in a way that’s very different from the industry you went into and we’re trying to get them to be able to work in this industry and yet keep their identity, keep their nerve and this is hard to do. I’m wondering whether, through any of your travels, there are things you’ve told .. how we can help them, keep their nerve even when what they’re dealing with is what one might call a debased currency and having to trade in that currency while being themselves.
I think the nub of it is .. I mean from the very beginning I always operated on parallel lives. I’ve always worked in television, radio, theatre, movies if they came asking for me and the printed page. I’ve always had somewhere to run to. I’ve never written a word that I didn’t want to write. That when the phone call came I would say ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Possibly’ and I turned a lot of things away at a time when I needed the money. I was offered ‘Coronation Street’ three times and said ‘No’ three times. A bit like Julias Caesar ‘I was three times offered the kingly crown which I did thrice refuse.’ Not because I didn’t like the show. Actually it’s the only soap of ever really had much affection for, especially in the days when Jack and John Finch were writing them. I could spot a Jack Rosenthal ‘Coronation Street’ in thirty seconds and would stay for it. You must learn to say ‘No’ if it sounds silly. But learn to say ‘Yes’ if there is some way you can use this particular experience. I can’t make the mental leap, you know, to being 25 again, to being 20 again. All I can do is make a huge imaginative stretch and say well, if I was offered, you know, a stint on ‘Eastenders’ I would say ‘What can I .. How can I use this to help what I want to do?’ ‘What stories which belong to me and to me alone can I feed into this genre?’ one of the things I’d always wanted to do and probably won’t now, was a western. I had a great western story. It’s actually a Canadian story. I would love to write a western, which is ludicrous, but I could find my way .. so there are certain great genres like the western, like the private eye, where you can climb inside and be yourself. In a later episode of ‘Trinity Tales’ in fact, Frances Matthews does a voice-over which is a parody of Philip Marlowe, of going down the mean streets of Birmingham late at night. I can’t remember the .. but it was a lovely opportunity to climb inside a genre and use it to your own devices. So I think you don’t say ‘No’ as a blanket. ‘You’re all filthy dirty horrible institutions, I want nothing to do with you.’ But instead ‘How can I use this? But how can I avoid not being used by it?’ You use television but the minute television starts using you then head for the door.
Apart from writing for series as you’ve done with ‘Z Cars’ and so on, you’ve done the other three main options, adaptations, serialised dramas and one-off dramas, and I wonder whether you make any distinction yourself in any way between the importance of those in your writing of them and also in terms of their importance for television drama. You mentioned how short the list is one-offs for example.
Yeah, adaptations, it’s a very simple test. I would be sent a book and I would read it and I would say ‘Is there anywhere I can hang my hat?’ and if the answer is ‘Yes’ then I’d do it. If the answer is ‘No’ then I don’t do it. There’s a very impressive list of people I’ve turned down and also a fairly unimpressive one names like Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper who’s work I’ve been offered and in the words of Arthur Askey I said ‘I’m not giving them the kiss of life’. I’m showing off now, this is shameful but it is true. Yeah, ‘Can I have a good time?’ is also part of it. We had a lovely time doing ‘Fortunes of War’ and doing ‘Barchester Chronicles’ with Betty who’s here tonight. But also .. and the sheer nonsense of it all. I mean that opening shot .. we flew out to Zagreb which is where we were based doing that bit of ‘Fortunes’ and this is when I discovered the nightmare of being a producer, because I didn’t write helicopter shot of a train steaming through the Balkans. I wrote it very cheaply as a matter of fact. I think I wrote the hills and the wisp of smoke and the noise and Jimmy said ‘Oh we’ll get a train, we’ll get a train and then somebody here will have a helicopter.’ But the day we went they’d just got .. we looked at the rushes and it had been a very windy day so that shot everything was shaking and Betty was having to sort out the logistics of getting the train back and the helicopter back. And this being Yugoslavia, bless it, you could have the train on Tuesday but not on Wednesday and the helicopter on Wednesday but not on Tuesday. It was that kind of logistical thing. I mean that’s fun because it makes for good stories. If it makes for good stories then you can live with a lot of things. We had a good time and I suppose ultimately you always say the thing that is purest and simplest and most of oneself like the ‘Biederbeck Trilogy’ that we weren’t talking about earlier. The ‘Biederbecks‘ are the, I suppose, the essence of me, take it or leave it. We were on location, Shirley and I were on location, on, I think, the first series and we’re at the school, the one that became known as San Quentin High in the ‘Biederbeck’ series and watching Jimmy Bolam doing one of his famous walks from the staff room to the woodwork room. And I turned to Shirley and I said ‘I’ve just realised something.’ ‘What?’ ‘Jimmy’s dressed the same as I am’ and Shirley said ‘Have you just noticed?’ and they’d been doing it since Day 1. They’d been dressing Bolam exactly the way that I was dressed and I’d never noticed. I draw no conclusions from that.
Earlier you were talking about demographics and I think you said that the sort of 18 - 35 years olds are out clubbing instead of watching TV.
No, younger than 35.
OK 18 - 25s. We find consistently that that age group, they are watching TV but they’re watching only American products. They’re watching ‘ER’, ‘Sopranos’, ‘Simpsons’ on and on and on. Does this point some big problem with what’s on offer in the home field?
It may well be a problem because I think what that generation’s been fed in media other than television, is largely American. In popular music, certainly in movies. If you’re going to see ‘Rambo’ and everything that followed. If your role models are film makers Quentin Tarrentino, you won’t rush home to watch ‘Dad’s Army’. There are contradictions here and I’m sure you’re right. But I don’t think we solve the problem by trying to imitate the Americans. And certainly not by trying to imitate the way they work. There’s a bit of a .. there is pressure over this side to adopt the American method of team writing, because their comedy shows tend to have big teams of writers who are all on huge salaries. That’s the bit that doesn’t cross the Atlantic well. But that’s their way of working. The Americans have been doing it for fifty or sixty years. It started in radio. I’ve got a book at home that we found in Los Angeles of interviews with old radio writers, that used to write for Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Groucho for the radio. And that tradition of team writing grew out of a commercial broadcasting ethic and the need .. lots of stuff to consume. Jack Benny by the way who is a hero anyway became more a hero to me when I discovered he was the first comedian to insist that his writers be credited on the radio. Because the audience was supposed to think that Bob Hope made it all up himself that very second. Benny said ‘No, this is wrong’ and he was .. so he has an honoured place in the galaxy of stand up comics. I don’t think we .. we can’t do what the Americans can do. We watched the first episode of ‘24’ and, you know, it’s kind of slick in a way that we actually can’t do. The best cop show of the last decade, as far as I’m concerned, a show called ‘Homicide’ buried by Channel 4 very late at night. We can’t do that. We actually can’t do that. But by the same token they can’t do what we do and it’s silly for us all to be trying. But I think there is .. you have .. folks have a very exact and real problem if they’re kind of cultural parameters are being determined, to a large extent, from across the Atlantic, I don’t know what we can make that will appeal to them. And on the whole I think by the implications of what I’m saying is the hell with them not let’s bother. Let’s concentrate on the people who will listen and their generation of writers, if they can find their way through the system will have to supply whatever their needs are. You see I can’t write for teenagers. I can write for my grandchildren, you know, I’ve written a children’s story and they think I’m brilliant because grandpa wrote it. Little ones are no problem but I don’t know what’s going on in the heads of, you know, late adolescence, early twenties. There’s a whole universe out there which I’m not allowed into it, and nor should I be. I can’t speak for that generation. Their generation has to speak for that generation. But I think the central principles of what we’re arguing is really about creative freedom, being given creative freedom and proper solid fearless backing by the people in the front office. I think that’s a self evident argument.
OK thank you all very much for your questions and thank you all very much for coming. It’s a privilege for me to be able to give a vote of thanks on behalf of the university this evening and I would like to thank my sponsors, the British taxpayer, for supporting me here tonight. Thank you very much for sharing your stories. It was really quite striking some of the things that you were saying about the change of culture over the years in plying your craft and what the challenges that we face in higher education trust. I mean these are words that we remember quite fondly I think and the tension between balance sheets and what it is that we’re trying to do. The university is clearly a business but business principles can’t pervade everything and I was very, very struck by what you were saying about your blueprint. Obsession with ratings. I mean here we are plagued with league tables and things like that. And I was struck .. there was a resonance with a talk that Roger gave, I think, last year that he shared with me about technology and the role of technology and not being driven by technology. So, you know, there are a number of lessons there and a number of tensions and I think your English teacher was very wise, if you’ve got nothing to say then stop. I think you’ve left us with some wonderful, wonderful tales and I think the .. your first rave review, I think, was wonderful, the voice of ‘Coronation Street’ and the spirit of Chekov and have no doubt that you will be invited back because I think our students and ourselves still have very much to learn and we look forward to that learning. Thank you very much Professor Plater.
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