Land of Green Ginger: Alan Plater pt1

Interview by Dave Rolinson, recorded: London, 3 July 2006 – PAGE 1 OF 2

Page 1 Page 2

Writer: Alan Plater
Director: Brian Parker
Producer: David Rose
Broadcast: 15 January 1973

This piece assumes background knowledge of the play. ^[1] For a short essay and synopsis, see my piece for Screenonline. For more detailed analysis, 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, Vol. 4, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 285-306, available in print or, if you have access, online here. This article lists many other sources worth following, including articles and talks by Plater. ^[2] I would like to thank Alan Plater 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. ^[3] The project came to nothing, because I think they’d worked out the budget [...] or, for whatever reasons, 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.

I sent him the script in its original form. I do remember getting clearance from Philip’s publishers [...] because I was going to quote little bits from the poem Here as a kind of musical chorus going through. Anyway, David read it, said yeah this is interesting, but we can do the whole thing on location if you like. So okay, I said I’ll start again. Same basic story, trawlerman comes home, girl living in London, all the rest. And by this time I’d got to know the Watersons and had worked with them, done occasional gigs with them around Hull, the [East] Riding. So I said could we use the Watersons. So David listened to the music, said let’s do it. So that’s it, I wrote it [...] changed the title from The Surprise of a Large Town to Land of Green Ginger, which has a lovely kind of metaphorical quality it seemed to me. And it was all very quick and comfortable.

I’d worked with [director Brian Parker] on Z-Cars and Softly Softly so that was a well-established team. Brian later directed one of the Beiderbecke series, so we kept popping up in each other’s lives over a period. I did get much more involved with it than with most plays, because of the setting [...] Brian came up to Hull and I [...] showed him all the locations. I actually told him: “We’ll see him walking down that road there” – I didn’t quite do a camera script or a storyboard, but I talked him through [...] it was a very detailed kind of preparation period. And what is on the screen is pretty well exactly what I wrote, plus what I talked to Brian about, plus of course what the actors gave it – there’s John [Flanagan] and Gwen [Taylor], who were then relatively new and unknown. [...]

There are some directors who’ll read a script and ignore all the stage directions. [...] Because I trained as an architect, I’ve got a bit of visual sense. I actually know where I want the camera to be. I’ve had some major rows with directors about this. [...] they don’t like you interfering with what they see as their prerogative. It isn’t really, because film writing is about the pictures as well as the people and what they’re doing. I just describe what they’re doing, what they’re saying. Not necessarily how they’re saying it, because that varies from actor to actor. ^[4]

It is a very specific screenplay [...] because I knew the area, better than any of the people who were gonna be in it and involved with it, so it seemed obvious and sensible. David was very happy with it and he didn’t complain and Brian Parker didn’t complain, and it worked.[...] I did spend a lot of time with them [on set] on Green Ginger because it was handy and local. I think I was more involved on a day-to-day basis with Brian Parker than I would have been normally. Not exactly holding his hand, but just… I was interested. I wanted it to be right, that was the big thing: it had to be right. ^[5]

[David Rose] did some amazing work [...] in that period, aside from the fact that he was the best patron I ever had inside British television, if you look at the span of the work, the first producer to give Alan Bleasdale airtime. ^[6] The actual content of the work was very diverse, you had things like Gangsters came out of that period, and that was probably the first of the really hard-hitting, brutal crime-cop shows, to the very gentle things that I suppose I do. I don’t do violence – it’s not what I do, guv. But yeah, I think there was a house style, mainly because we had the same in-house technical crew, the same camera crews, the sound people. So there would be that kind of consistency. It was always a great plus-factor to have in-house people. [...] ^[7]

I’ve always been a bit resistant to conventional narrative. When I was a kid, late teens, early twenties, I would go to the New Theatre in Hull, to see the weekly rep company we had in those days, and there’d be all these people… there’s always one set, and it was generally a domestic setting, and the big climax at the end of the first act was almost always the girl saying “Daddy, I’m pregnant”… “Woah! That’s terrible!” I think, “I’m not very interested in this.” What I’m interested in is people being, not people doing. So many plays seem to be inventing stuff to happen to people, instead of digging into their lives, what are the real issues. And it’s in Green Ginger, it’s a real issue: “I’m in love with a guy who’s away for three weeks at a time catching fish, and I’m not prepared to deal into that.” That’s a much bigger issue, actually. And for the guy himself: “I’ve got what I want. I’ve got me skipper’s ticket, that’s what I’ve been working for for the last ten years. And I’ve grafted and I’ve worked and possibly bribed one or two people along the way, and I’ve got it. I’m supposed to chuck all that up, and what? Work behind a bar, or a building site?”

And there was this remarkable kind of culture – I was an observer, I had no direct involvement – but there was a remarkable culture of the fishing industry, [...] in the fish merchant’s club, for example. Our nextdoor neighbour for a while, til they moved up in the world and moved to Kirkella, he was a fish merchant – he’d worked on the trawlers. The story is that he had a big win on the Irish sweep and bought himself into a fish merchant company, with a place on the dock in Hull and an office in Fleetwood [...] He [spent time] on the dock in the fish merchant’s club, playing snooker for high stakes. And it was also the place where all the gossip about Hull City emanated, because the Chairman of the City board at that time was a fish merchant, or there was a connection. So, it was a whole culture. The club has long gone and the fish dock has long gone. All that stuff is much more interesting than “I think I’m going to have a baby” or “I want to marry the wrong man”. There was this kind of domestic trivia, it’s like dramatised versions of births, deaths and marriage columns in the local paper. We should actually be living through a very good period from this point of view, because I think the soaps have taken over all that stuff, the domestic trivia plotting, that’s the bread-and-butter of soap opera. So the people who are doing what I like to call “proper drama” [laughs] can look at other things and, in my view, other, more interesting things.

I’m far enough away from a lot of the things I’ve written: I think a recurring theme is work. And it’s probably because, having trained as an architect, I trained to do a proper job. Having done that proper job for a couple of years and then escaped from it, I’m very conscious of the way work defines people. Almost all the plays I do are about people working or about their relationship with work and, through that work, their relationship with society round about. ^[8] [...] So I’ve rarely written about people just as social units, as social beings. I don’t write very much about families just as families, but about families as their lives are either enriched or corrupted, or limited, by the need to earn a living.

I’m a bit of a classical Greek in that respect. A lot of my stage plays observe the classical unities, because it’s a good way of focusing: say, “okay, put it all in a day.” You’ve got a bunch of characters, of every age, every background, put all of that into a day, and that really focuses everybody’s minds. ^[9] [...] The theatrical parallel is probably Chekhov, because Chekhov if you like invented, perfected, refined this, not a lot goes on in Chekhov, except you see the entire bleeding world on the stage in front of you, you see. Whole communities bracing themselves for the revolution, actually, but not quite sure what to do about it, they’re kind of paralysed. As Maureen Lipman says, they sit there in the middle distance and dreaming of Moscow, but that’s fine, that’ll do for me. I mean, narrative, what is narrative? Does it involve having to have someone hitting someone or murdering someone? Well, no, not really.[...]

I remember John Hopkins – who was script editor on Z Cars and the best writer of the time, he was the guv’nor – introduced me to Ermanno Olmi, the great Italian neo-realist. At his behest I saw a film called Il Posto, The Job. It’s just about… It’s The Office, but they’re not as nasty, they’re just these people who go to the office everyday. All that happens is one of them dies. The one who dies, we’ve seen him in his lunch hours, writing what’s obviously a novel or a story or something, and after he dies they find this, “What’s this?”, call it ‘personal’ and throw it in the waste paper basket. And that’s the story! This man’s life is dumped in a waste paper basket. I might have mis-remembered it [...] Or a marvellous movie called Tree of the Wooden Clogs, which runs for about three hours, is about a peasant community in Italy, and a kid needs some clogs because he’s going to school, and dad chops down a tree to make the clogs, and the tree belongs to the land owner, and he finds out, and he loses his job, and then they’re thrown out. And that’s all it’s about, chopping down a tree and making a pair of clogs. And it’s about everything. And it looks magnificent, and beautifully acted – beautifully non-acted, if you like. So, yeah, I think all that stuff did kind of burnish its way…

We all need a tough patron. The whole of art from the beginning of time hinges on the patron. I have this invented story about Michelangelo getting the job of painting the Sistine Chapel, and he gets a phone call from his agent to say, “Hey, we’ve got a really good gig for you.” “Oh, what’s that?” he said. “You’re going to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” “Wow”, he said, “That’s a big one.” “That’s the biggest, mate. That’s the biggest, baby”. “Oh, when do I…” He said, “There is just one snag: you can paint anything you like…” “Yeah?” “Except it has to be to the greater glory of God.” And Michelangelo said, “Oh, shit!” [...] this really winged its way home when I was an architect, that you can’t be a better designer as an architect than your client’s imagination will permit you to be. The level I was operating at, it didn’t matter: I was doing at best case the odd little house or bathroom and veranda extensions and a shop front here and there. But at the higher levels, the reason there was so much mediocre architecture in Hull in the immediate post-war period was the people commissioning the stuff weren’t bright enough to see that it was mediocre. I mean, things have got much better since then, hence The Deep ^[10]) and the football stadium ^[11], and so on [...]

I used my common sense – there were one or two things where I thought that the audience outside of Hull won’t understand this, so I’ll offer a word of explanation [...] The only compromises would be with the accents of the principal characters. ^[12] [...] Once we’d cast John and Gwen, I said, “well, for the locals” – because you were tied into Equity membership of course, there [were] very strong union things happening then – if people were in the Variety Artists Association, that qualified them. So, the locals in it, like Clive Hunter, the taxi driver, he was in the Variety Artists Association, so he could be in it. The woman who plays John’s mum, she was a local Variety club performer. ^[13] They were all club acts. Clive was lovely – I knew him quite well, because he actually used to work in the music store on Spring Bank [...] The support players [...] were all Hull-based.

Continues on Page 2.

References

1. I have selected only a few quotations from a detailed interview, and have omitted 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. Text in [brackets] offers further guidance and ellipses are indicated by [...]) [↩]
2. Plater has also written a lovely memoir, Doggin’ Around. If you want to research Plater’s work, I can provide a full transcript of the interview, but I also strongly recommend the Alan Plater archive at the University of Hull.) [↩]
3. Larkin’s poem, titled Here, is discussed in my article. [↩]
4. I’ve deleted an example of one such row on a different project. [↩]
5. The comments from ‘I did spend a lot of time’ through to ‘it had to be right’ were taken from later in the interview. [↩]
6. Our conversation covered several examples such as Penda’s Fen, and Alan discussed his first meeting with Bleasdale at Pebble Mill and the ‘mutual appreciation society’ that developed between them. [↩]
7. Our conversation covered examples of in-house people on productions like the Beiderbecke series. Alan also talked about how the BBC Birmingham culture had ‘re-emerged in a different form’ as the Pebble Mill team, thanks to Doctors, had the chance to make The Afternoon Play, to which Alan contributed The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two-Sheds, tx 17 January 2006, which we also discussed. [↩]
8. Alan discussed specific examples in his work, such as Last of the Blonde Bombshells. [↩]
9. In our discussion of resistance of conventional narrative, we moved on to some of Plater’s episodes of Z Cars in which ‘nothing happened’. I made the point that reflecting community and Northern language is as strong in Alan’s Z Cars episodes as in his single plays, to which Alan responded: ‘The significant thing about what you’ve just said is that all the writers on Z Cars were encouraged to write like themselves, there was no attempt at getting a house style, so that, when the guy said to me, “I could tell it was one of yours”, you wouldn’t get that with The Bill, I don’t think.’ Plater has expanded on these ideas in talks cited in my article. We talked much more about Z Cars, but that section of this interview will feature in a forthcoming publication. [↩]
10. Hull’s impressive submarium – details here [↩]
11. The KC Stadium, home to football team Hull City and rugby league team Hull FC. [↩]
12. Neither of the leads, Gwen Taylor and John Flanagan, were from Hull or the local area. Alan went on to discuss Hull actors from around that period, from Tom Courtenay and John Alderton to Barrie Rutter. [↩]
13. These locals were focused on the preview: Yvonne Thomas, ‘“I’m not ee-ba-gooming all the time”’, Radio Times, 11 January 1973, p. 11. [↩]