Interview by Dave Rolinson, recorded: London, 3 July 2006 – PAGE 2 OF 2
[On the play’s use of music.] I went round to the Watersons’ house. [1] At that time they were living off Spring Bank. And I told them the story, in broad terms. And I said, look, I need songs that will illustrate these ideas… North Country Maid I knew, because that’s kind of almost a folk standard, and I’d got all their recorded work anyway, up until that point. And they went through their archive and suggested songs. Of course, they made the useful point that most sea songs are not specific to any particular area, because… if you could sing a sailor song… because they were travelling the world, they would just change the names of the pubs and the women to suit where they were. I think the song is actually called Outward and Homeward Bound, “here comes so-and-so with his three weeks’ pay”. I just changed the words to match the play. They’re all folk standards, I think some of them were in the Penguin Book of English Folk Song [...] None of them were specially written, but they were adapted. I dropped in place names and pub names, and character names, indeed – I dropped in the boy’s character name to match. That’s the folk tradition, that’s what’s always happened with the folk process. [2] [...]
[We] set up a proper session at The Haworth Arms… which at that time was a regular music venue, a jazz and folk venue. [...] It might have been that they suggested that this would work, or somebody suggested that this would work better than what I’d written, or maybe by the time we got to doing it, I’d spent more time with Mike and Norma… [...] the Blue Bell used to be the folk venue. I think that it might have been that the Haworth was better to shoot in, because the Blue Bell was long and thin, because I’ve seen documentaries – they did a documentary about the Watersons [3], and it’s a long, thin room, and there’s only one camera angle, which is the front-on view, whereas the Haworth is a bigger room and you can do cutaways and things…
[I highlighted the exciting cut to the music performance scene – a shift from the Watersons' music as background/non-diegetic sound to them performing/diegetic sound - discussed at length in my article.] It’s my favourite moment, actually, is the cut: “Oh, God, these are real people”. Because [...] it might have been done in a television play prior to that [but] normally television music, even in those days, was something you heard, and we assumed it was being played on a piece of tape, or it had been recorded in a studio, or was just from the archive somewhere, but suddenly to meet head-on: “Ah, these people are part of the same community”, which they were. It gave it a special sort of reality. [...]
I think [being closely involved with the production] was a good decision because, of course, there was a huge row afterwards. [...] There were a lot of letters to the Hull [Daily] Mail saying, how dare you say these things about Hull. And I made the point that, if you looked at the addresses on the letters, all the letters complaining were from outside of Hull – they were from Anlaby, Cottingham – and all the letters supporting me were [from Hull]. It was almost as clear as that. But David, bless him, said “let’s meet ‘em head on”. What we did at Spring Street was, we ran the film to anyone who wanted to come [...] David came up, we had an open discussion, which was broadcast live I think on Radio Humberside. I think Jim Hawkins organised that. That was almost unique – unique in my experience, a play having this kind of impact, this kind of feedback and the audience – the subject if you like – talking back at me. [4] [...]
A full house, a really lively, passionate debate about: does one have a duty, if you’re writing about a specific place, are you there to do PR on its behalf? “No” is the simple answer, you’re not. That was a recurring theme. There used to be a programme on the BBC called Talkback [...] where viewers could challenge what they’d seen, and they would have the programme-makers there [...] The recurring one was the image of the North as presented on television. I’d get the phone call: would you be available to do Talkback next week, and I would say, “Oh, is it the image of the North as presented on BBC television?” and they’d say, “Yes, it’s that one again.” And I’d say, “Well, I’ve done it all before, but I’ll do it again.”
At that time, the thinking was, the North needed people to come in and invest their money and build factories, reinvigorate the economy. We had, you’d have industrialists in the [TV] audience saying all this, or local councillors, saying all this: my responsibility. I said, okay, [...] imagine I’m a big industrialist, and I’m thinking, I’m gonna build a big factory in Hull, or in Newcastle, or in Liverpool, but before I do, I’m gonna watch this play, to make sure that…. I said, I don’t do that. I want good rail communications, good road communications, I want a skilled workforce, or maybe an unskilled workforce, I want all the basic services that will enable me to build… I don’t want to watch a play to make my mind up, it’s absolute nonsense. There was a lot of that about. People are very protective, and that’s okay. They’ve very protective of their communities and their cities and towns and everything, and they don’t like it if it’s… I wasn’t saying everyone’s a load of drugs and drug-crazed adolescents beating up the place. [...]
I wasn’t going to attack Hull, I was living there, I’d lived there a greater lump of my life in Hull than anywhere else. [5] I’m interested in what makes particular areas particular. So I’ve written a lot about Tyneside, which is my birthplace, about what’s happening in Newcastle and Gateshead, the North East generally. I’ve written about South Wales, I’ve written about the Orkneys. It’s always about, how does this community hang together? I tend to turn off drama – not physically, but sort of emotionally – where it’s telling me that this family, this community is dysfunctional because… I would rather write this family, this community is functional despite… It’s the same story, you’ve turned it around. [...] I mean, I’m 71 years old and no-one has ever hit me. I haven’t lived a particularly sheltered life – I’ve travelled around the world, been to dozens, hundreds of football matches, when you went on terraces. So, for me to depict a violent society would be hypocrisy, would be telling a lie. [6]
[I quoted stage directions from Plater’s original script and asked if they had achieved the tricky balance between surrealism, naturalism and lyricism: Alan’s description of a shot of the River Hull read, ‘If it’s a little misty and magical, all the better’ to capture Hull. I then asked if he thought Brian Parker had achieved it.] A hell of a direction! [...] Yes, I do actually. We looked at it last year when BBC4 did this documentary about me, and they re-ran it [...] I actually said to Shirley: that was quite good, wasn’t it? [laughs] And it looked terrific. And that shot from the ferry – you can see the medieval town.
Joan Littlewood did a lot of work in Hull I think just before the war and possibly just after as well, for BBC Radio. She did documentaries, early documentaries. She said you could walk the streets of Hull and hear the people speaking poetry. [I thought,] “that’s interesting”. She didn’t mean iambic pentameters, but that in all regional accents there is a kind of poetic element. Admittedly you’ve got to dig around, you’ve got to distill it. You don’t walk down Whitefriargate and think, “Wow, listen to all that poetry”. It’s not that, it’s much more complex than that. But I think there is a poetic streak in all [Northern, Scottish, Welsh] accents [...] I think it’s one of the jobs of a writer with regional roots to sing that song for them. Tom Hadaway, great Tyneside writer – died a couple of years back [7] – Tom had been a fish merchant and a fisherman in North Shields, started writing plays, wrote a wonderful play set on a North Shields fish quay, a television play. And afterwards people said, “Well, it’s wonderful, Tom, but people on a North Shields fish quay don’t talk like that.” And he said, “But that’s what they want to say, and I help them to say it”. And I think that you’re giving voice to the dream, if you like, and if that’s lyricism of a kind then that’s what it is.
[On the playful scene in which Sally hears a journalist is writing a piece on the regions and likes Hull the best so far, and replies, ‘Lucky old us’.] We get beaten over the heads a lot with post-modern irony – people have been doing irony in Hull and in the North for hundreds of years.[...] There’s a great moment – I’m often quoting this. Something had happened in Hull, so all the national press and the telly went up there, it might have been the North Hull by-election or trawler disasters, one of those things that happen about once a year, so it would happen they’d all show up… So they interviewed this bloke. The reporter made some slighting remark about the city, and he said, “It’s alright for you, you want to try living here.” You can pick the bones out of that – it’s like it’s a challenge to your machismo to be able to survive in this city; on the other hand I’m not moving. One of the most interesting things– the world is full of interesting things – somebody with nothing better to do did a survey about four years ago of people who were happy with the place they lived in, are you happy, unhappy to live where you are. [...] More people were happy to live in Barnsley than anywhere else to live. [...] Where I’m maybe different from some of my colleagues in the trade, I identify equally – or in a different way – with Tyneside, because that was the birthplace and there’s something equally special about that. And I can, using the experience of two places, trying to penetrate the mystery of what they’re about, you can go and apply that to other communities and it’s interesting what then emerges.[...] [8]
It’s way out of left field, but in the early 90s we did a research trip to Jamaica for a project with Lenny Henry that never happened. We met an academic in Jamaica who said the history of the world is a history of great migrations… went into the black diaspora and all that. It suddenly occurs to me that the history of Hull, or Newcastle, or any of the Northern industrial cities – this idea of the migration is crucial to understanding how some communities to some extent disintegrated and others had this estate malaise, if you like. It’s in Tom Courtenay’s book about his mum: she had this lovely house with a bathroom and everything and wasn’t happy. [9] And it’s this lack of understanding by the people who make the decisions in high places on how communities work. And if they’d done a serious job of rehabilitation down the Hessle Road and Holderness Road, and kept the community – now, this all presupposed at the time that the fishing industry was going to stay, and that the docks would stay, in their labour-intensive form, which they didn’t. So, that immediately would have thrown a number of jokers into the pack. I think it is acknowledged now that they got it wrong – [...] it wasn’t unique to Hull, the multi-storey bit, all of which was blown out of the water anyway architecturally and from a planning point of view by a woman called Jane Jacobs who died only this year, an American writer who wrote a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities, about Boston, largely about Boston [10]. She said tall buildings don’t equal high density, this a myth that’s put about by architects who want to build tall buildings [laughs].
But… I believe something was lost when people were moved out. I think something is always lost when people are moved other than when they ask to. If they’re told, virtually you’re told they’re going. It’s a forced migration, and that’s never made people happy ever in the history of the world. [After much discussion of changes around Hessle Road.] [Jane Jacobs] said the mistake the planners make is to think in zones, and she was all against, “We’ll have a cultural zone here”. She said no, you don’t do that, you have bits of culture all over the place. Don’t knock down a little theatre and build a bigger one, build another little one somewhere else. What makes cities interesting – this was her thesis – was the diversity, of finding six different things in the same street. So she would have been horrified by Starbucks and Pizza Express and all this stuff [laughs].
[On the 'metaphorical' use of Land of Green Ginger, a small street in Hull's Old Town but also a title with mythical connotations. At one stage Sally and Mike wonder ‘Shall we look for it?’, it’s barely a minute away, but for the rest of the play they walk away from it.] I think it is a kind of metaphor for their relationship, that I think she knows that there should be an answer to their dilemma, and if they look really, really hard they would find it, but it’s not immediately apparent, so they kind of quit, and say, line across the ledger, turn the page, start again, look for somebody else. I mean, that’s really what it’s about. It’s a very sad little piece, really. It’s about unrequited love, or sort of semi-requited, and it’s kind of a blues, really.
[On the use of the Humber Bridge.] I think I would’ve argued that the bridge symbolised some mythological future when it’s all gonna be alright, because at the time I didn’t think we’d ever get this damn bridge [...] [11] Oddly enough, the Bridge came back to haunt me in a cheerful way. I did a play about Peggy Ramsay, my agent, called Peggy for You, in which she tells the story – Peggy Ramsay, the character, tells the story, but this actually happened. She came to Hull and I took her to see the Bridge being built. Then she goes on in the play to elaborate on this to this young writer: “The Bridge is rather like your play, darling. All plays are the same, you take the audience by the hand and you lead them across the Bridge, and the far end of the Bridge is in the mist and you can’t see the other end. You get to the other side of the Bridge and the mist clears and the audience says, “My God, this is a wonderful place, thank you for bringing us here.” All plays are like that.” And the young man says, “Oh, and mine…?” [And she says,] “No, darling. When we finish your play, we’re still at the same side of the river.” [...]
If you like, the sole justification of being a writer is, you tell the truth. The truth that you see. I was saying this the other day, that I think there are two types of writers: those who look out the window and those who look in a mirror. The ones who look in mirrors tend to be poets, and maybe novelists, and on the whole, I think, certainly the playwrights I admire look out the window. [12]
References
- This section on the music came later in the interview, but I’ve moved it to here for structural reasons. [↩]
- In my 2007 article, I discuss the songs’ history and how local-amendation in the folk tradition enhances the play. [↩]
- Travelling for a Living, tx. BBC2, 16 May 1966. Available as part of The Watersons: Mighty River of Song box set. [↩]
- Alan also responded to other opinions, such as Nancy Banks-Smith’s opinion that the play’s accents were like being slapped in the face with a wet fish. [↩]
- Plater gave a talk for the Hull Civic Society at the Ferens Art Gallery on ‘Hull on Television’, during which he rejected public relations agendas and insisted that the play was ‘written out of love for the city’, and said that ‘If a retired Brigadier from Eastbourne might think that Hull smells of fish it… will not affect my way of life at all’ – Hull Daily Mail, 26 March 1974. [↩]
- Alan recalled writing a very different kind of violence for Marple. [↩]
- Hadaway’s television work included God Bless Thee, Jacky Maddison (1974) for Centre Play and early episodes of When the Boat Comes In (1976-81). In an obituary for Hadaway, Plater quoted him: ‘if our betters shame us out of our phrases and pronunciation, we shall be without resource. From a shared history, dialect is the enabling power of the commoner.’ – Alan Plater, ‘Tom Hadaway’ obituary, The Guardian, 11 March 2005. In interview, Plater also cited the work of the Amber Film collective. [↩]
- This section, from ‘Where I’m maybe different’ through to ‘what then emerges’ is moved from elsewhere in the interview. [↩]
- Tom Courtenay, Dear Tom: Letters from Home (London: Doubleday, 2000). [↩]
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961). [↩]
- We discussed other specific Hull locations, such as Pickering Park – “That was my park. We used to go there regularly.”. The play’s recording of areas from Hull ranging from Bransholme to Hessle Road make it also a fascinating social history alongside, for instance, the books of local historian Alec Gill, who who began taking photographs of Hessle Road residents during the same period, the 1970s. To get a sense of the trawler disasters in whose shadow Mike is moving, or the community the play is based around, see Gill’s Lost Trawlers of Hull: Nine Hundred Losses 1835-1987, Beverley: Hutton Press, 1989) or Hull’s Fishing Heritage: Aspects of Life in the Hessle Road Fishing Community, Barnsley: Wharncliffe Books, 2003). My article goes into the use of Hull in much detail. [↩]
- The section from ‘If you like, the sole’ through to ‘out the window’ has been moved from a different part of the interview. [↩]
