Tag: David Rose

The Fishing Party (1972)

JOHN WHEATCROFT

Play for Today Writer: Peter Terson; Producer: David Rose; Director: Michael Simpson

“Contact with the lavatory on all floors”

Peter Terson’s best known plays, Zigger Zagger and The Apprentices, present a tough and unsentimental view of the world and of the occasional cruelties that people, more often than not working-class men, can heap on one another. His 1972 television comedy The Fishing Party is a gentler affair, although not without its acerbic moments.1

Three miners, Art (Brian Glover), Ern (Ray Mort) and Abe (Douglas Livingstone) head for Whitby where they have arranged a trip out to sea for some cod fishing. First they need accommodation and they find a truly grotty bed and breakfast. A snooty landlady, Audrey (Jane Freeman) and her hen-pecked husband Brian (Frank Moorey) agree after some shenanigans to give them a room for the night, at an exorbitant price. These early scenes run dangerously close to pure silliness in their depiction of unsophisticated working-class behaviour on the one hand and petty-bourgeois pretentiousness on the other. The Fishing Party is not a piece of work that has worn well. However, some gems of comic dialogue do a little to rescue the situation.

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  1. Play for Today: The Fishing Party, tx. BBC1, 1 June 1972. ↩

Interview with Alan Plater about Land of Green Ginger (1973)

BY DAVID ROLINSON

Interview recorded in London on 3 July 2006

Play for Today Writer: Alan Plater; Director: Brian Parker; Producer: David Rose

This piece assumes background knowledge of the play.1 For a short essay and synopsis, see my piece for Screenonline. For detailed analysis and mention of other Plater sources, see my article ‘The Surprise of a Large Town: Regional Landscape in Alan Plater’s Land of Green Ginger’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 4:2, November 2007, pp. 285-306, available in print or online. Plater also wrote the lovely memoir Doggin’ Around. If you want to research Plater’s work, I can provide a full interview transcript; I strongly recommend the University of Hull’s Alan Plater archive at the Hull History Centre. I am eternally grateful to Alan Plater (who sadly passed away in 2010) and Shirley Rubenstein for their time, warmth and generosity.

[ATV] had a project to do a 6-part series called A Tale of Six Cities […] and I wrote a play, and it was actually called The Surprise of a Large Town, from Philip Larkin’s poem.2 The project came to nothing […] they never made this series, and I just put it on a shelf. Cut to early ‘70s: David Rose is Head of Drama for BBC in Birmingham at Pebble Mill and he called me up […] – he would often do this – he said, “I need a 60-minute play or a half-hour piece, have you got anything on the shelf that we could look at?” I said, well, I’ve got this thing about Hull but you’d have to go to Hull. By this time of course it was now accepted you could actually go out on location and make plays on location. Because when I first wrote it, it was going to be studio-based with some little inserts. And that, I think, scared them a bit, because they would’ve had to send a camera to Hull and some actors and so on. So there’d been a cultural change by the time David approached me.

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  1. I have selected only a few quotations from a detailed interview, and have left out my questions which sometimes prompted points – for instance, a ‘house style’ at BBC Birmingham – but every word here was spoken by Alan Plater and has not been twisted out of context. Where comments have been moved from a different stage of the interview, this is indicated in footnotes. Italicised text in [brackets] offers further guidance and ellipses are indicated by […])  ↩

  2. Larkin’s poem, titled Here, is discussed in my article. ↩

Don Taylor

OLIVER WAKE

Dead of Night: The Exorcism

The BBC’s appointment of Sydney Newman as their head of drama in 1962 was the opening act of what some perceive as a “golden age” of British television drama. However, this is not how it appeared to everybody at the time, and the alienating effect of Newman’s “new broom” should be remembered. Perhaps the most outspoken casualty of Newman’s arrival was Don Taylor, a highly successful producer/director who found himself stifled and, he alleged, blacklisted by Newman.

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