Tuesday 29 June 2010

Alan Plater 1935 - 2010

Before we went on holiday to Scotland, we watched an amusing episode of Lewis. I had to know who wrote the script and was amazed to see that the person responsible was Alan Plater. I can remember Mum was always a big fan of his plays and I was almost sure he started with Z Cars for the BBC and some investigation proved this to be correct. This was a whole new dimension in television, the first character based police series starring amongst others, Stratford Johns. He wrote 18 episodes for Z Cars and 30 for it's successor Softly Softly.

He wrote many other great television dramas including the memorable The Beiderbeck Affair, and in more recent times a number of episodes for Dalziel and Pascoe and another four for Lewis. I was already planning to write this posting when we learned that he died last week. With a bit of luck the BBC will show some of his early work. I'm sure it will have stood the test of time.

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