DVD: Alan Plater at ITV

A Jarrow-born Humbersider, Plater (1935-2010) is considered a Northern dramatist, but the earliest play contained here, Brotherly Love (1973), is a potent dialectic about a family of London dockers. Tony Melody excels as an agonised former militant union leader who fought for a workers’ brotherhood but watched his sons - one an upwardly mobile family man in an office job (Ray Brooks), the other an unscrupulous forklift operator (Dennis Waterman) — become ethically conflicted. Fraternal contempt is handled less successfully in "Christina" (1979), the first episode of the dated costume drama Flambards, about a dyspeptic Essex landowner, his warring scions, and the eponymous teenage half-cousin who’s drawn to the delicate son rather than the braying huntsman.

These toffs are pallid characters beside Les Dawson, for whom Plater created The Loner series. In "Dawson’s Complaint" (1975), the lugubrious Lancastrian meets with nothing but obfuscation when he travels to London and Scotland to discover why his Biro doesn’t work. This man-in-the-street lark digs sharply at capitalism.

There’s a Beckettian absurdity about Plater’s comedy in full flow. The Party of the First Part (1978) concerns a bored commercial artist (Michael Gambon) who sustains himself and his family through jokes and repartee. The play heads joyfully nowhere until his sixth-former son impersonates Harpo Marx at his birthday party, driving away some uncomprehending bourgeois relatives. Plater disdained conventional dramatic structure so there are cul-de-sacs and wrong turnings, too, in The Beiderbecke Affair (1985), which, of course, is more about the romantic relationship between the phlegmatic jazz-loving Leeds woodwork teacher (James Bolam) and the droll, conservationist-minded English teacher (Barbara Flynn) than the MacGuffin-ish mystery; just the first Beiderbecke episode is included.

The collection also features a darkly atmospheric ghost story, The Intercessor (1983), starring John Duttine as a gentle writer unfazed by a dead child’s visitations. Best of all is Coming Through (1985), which beautifully deploys DH Lawrence’s poetry as it cuts between the emotionally honest nascent relationship of the writer (Kenneth Branagh) and Frieda Weekley (Helen Mirren) and that of two modern-day Lawrentians, a mature student (Alison Steadman) and a postgraduate (Philip Martin Brown), who each betray Lawrence’s spirit, the man crassly. Plater’s passion for Lawrence drove his intelligent 1970 The Virgin and the Gypsy adaptation and 1981 biopic Priest of Love.

The lone supplement on these discs is a brisk Yorkshire Television interview with Plater, Alan Ayckbourn and Colin Welland that examines the role of regionalism and class in their plays - Plater coming across as affable, modest, and the most deeply rooted of the three.

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