Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Devil's Music by Alan Plater Programme Index. Three plays by Alan Plater inspired by the Women's Jazz Archive. 1: Roll, Jordan, Roll. Rehearsing for the Brecon Jazz Festival, Megan keeps playing a certain melody, but where does it come from? Her musical detective trail leads to the 1880s and the visit to Swansea of a choir of emancipated slaves. Contributors. Source: Radio Times. Suggest an edit. BBC Radio 4 FM. About BBC Radio 4. Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio. Appears in. Suggest an Edit. We are trying to reflect the information printed in the Radio Times magazine. Press the 'Suggest an Edit' button Type in any changes to the title, synopsis or contributor information using the Radio Times Style Guide for reference. Click the. The Devil's Music by Alan Plater. Rambling good times of a true jazz lover. Playwright Alan Plater says he is fuelled by jazz � especially his hero Duke Ellington, writes Piers Plowright Doggin’ Around by Alan Plater Northway Publications, £6.99 order this book. SEVEN years ago, Alan Plater wrote a love-letter to the jazz great Duke Ellington. The great man had been dead a long time but that wasn’t the point. He was taking part in a Radio 4 series in which various people were invited to write letters to an icon of their choice and for Plater that was Ellington. Because he had style, because he had wit, and, above all, because he played great music. Plater fell in love with jazz in the early 1940s soon after his family moved from Jarrow to Hull and with live jazz in a youth club 10 years later when he heard the Port of Hull Jazz Band in full cry. He’s put it into his radio and TV plays and musicals, he’s written about it brilliantly and he’s spent half his life in Ronnie Scott’s. Now we have this book – well not so much a book, more a series of prose rambles, ‘doggin’ around’ the people, places and poetry of his life so far. It wasn’t, he says, meant to be an autobiography, but it will do nicely. And it’s full of jazz. Alan Plater, who lives in Tufnell Park, has been cheering up our culture for more than 40 years now. For TV, think Z Cars, Barchester Chronicles and The Beiderbecke Trilogy; for Radio, a flood of talks and plays, including his trilogy about a dynasty of feisty Welsh jazzwomen, The Devil’s Music. On stage, Close the Coalhouse Door, Rent Party, and Going Home. He’s also an inspiring lecturer. I remember sitting in an audience spellbound by the way he related the small things of life – his grandfather’s ring, the boredom of sitting in a police patrol car all night when nothing happens (an episode of Z Cars came out of that), the sound of someone singing the blues in a Leeds back street – to the act of creation. Doggin’ Around is full of such moments. Some great stories too. How he wasn’t quite hired by John Lennon to write the screenplay for a film about the 1962 A6 murder. John and Yoko couldn’t have been nicer but after the first meeting there was no other. About his own early appearance on stage during the Newcastle University student rag-week – Plater was failing to study architecture – as part of an invisible juggling troupe called the Forty-four Flying Fletchers (there were only three of them). The occasion when, owing to a schedule mix-up, Hull Local Radio prevented the citizens of that city from listening to Radio 2’s coverage of the Henry Cooper versus Joe Bugner heavyweight fight. They were treated instead to the late great Joe Harriott playing Perdido. Not quite the same thing. And there’s Plater’s hymn to the motorway network of the UK, and his verbal version of Zoot Sims playing Cherokee and… but you must get the book. Like a lot of good writers, Alan Plater always wanted to be someone else: James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, Dylan Thomas, and, of course, The Duke. He’s not done badly: some of Thurber’s surreal wit survives in him, he can draw pretty well (viz the illustrations in this book), and he shares with Dylan a sharp eye and the love of a good boozer. As far as I know, he doesn’t play the piano or compose to the Duke’s standards, but the spirit of his hero informs everything he does. “My approach to dramatic structure,” he writes, “is to play Duke Ellington’s 1940 version of ‘Harlem Air Shaft’ which contains all you need to know about dramatic structure, if you have ears to listen.” Alan Plater has the ears all right. It’s music that fuels him. And it’s good to be reminded, in this age of the eye, that listening is what sometimes makes the difference between civilisation and chaos, between beauty and brutality. On the last page of this entertaining elegy, Plater describes what he and his wife, Shirley, do when a new baby is born to family or friends: they put on the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis recording of A Child is Born. “The message is simple as the blues itself: in good times or bad we must embrace beauty.” The Devil's Music by Alan Plater. In an article written for Theatre Quarterly in 1977, 'Twenty-Five Years Hard: a Playwright's Personal Retrospective', Alan Plater acknowledged two early influences on his work. One was James Thurber , the American writer whose clever and comical stories appealed to the young Plater: "Thurber was and is the only writer I set out consciously to imitate." The other was Joan Littlewood , the theatre director, whose suggestion that "You can walk the streets of Hull and hear the people talking poetry" was taken to heart by the aspiring playwright. In his plays for radio, television and the theatre Plater did indeed turn the conversation of ordinary people into poetry: "I discovered what as a native Geordie I should have known all along - that in everyday speech there is a richness and music that makes the voice the most powerful and sensitive instrument for human emotion: and that this exists as a tool for the dramatist at its most useful when the voice speaks with a local accent or dialect." Born in Jarrow on 15 April 1935, Alan Frederick Plater was one of Britain's most prolific, original and entertaining writers, whose work for television, radio, theatre and the cinema, not to mention his six novels, constitutes an unparalleled body of work. Plater's family moved to Hull when he was three, but he frequently returned to Jarrow to visit his grandparents and spent four years in Newcastle in the 1950s studying architecture at the university. His affinity with Hull and Newcastle had a lasting influence on him as a writer, most obviously in plays such as Close the Coalhouse Door and Land of Green Ginger . A regional affinity with the North, even in series produced in London such as Z Cars , was the hallmark of much of his work, together with a predilection for comedy and a gift for writing dialogue. Plater's first television play, The Referees (tx. 2/10/1961), was written for BBC North and produced at the Dickinson Road studios in Manchester, once the home of Mancunian Films , the small company that produced the George Formby and Frank Randall films in the 1930s. Like much television drama of the period the play no longer exists, but Alan Plater remembered it well: "It was a slightly surreal piece. It was about a young man in a strange town - we never find out why he's in a strange town because we never see the town because it was all shot in studio - getting a job from this boss man. We don't find out what the work is, what the job is, except he's been given the job. Then as he's leaving the office the boss says 'and you'll let me have your references in the morning, I'll need to see your references,' and he realises he hasn't got any references, and it's about getting three references from total strangers. So it's an absurdly simple little plot. Finally, from memory, he gets drunk, winds up in a doss house, where a lunatic dosser forges the references for him, played by Harold Lang, who was a great, slightly manic actor and it was a weird, funny little play when I think about it." Plater's next television play, A Smashing Day (BBC, tx.17/8/1962), featuring Alfred Lynch and John Thaw , was performed for television, radio and the theatre, but it was the television version which came first. It was described in one review, much to Plater's delight, as "The voice of Coronation Street with the spirit of Chekhov " (Plater, 2003: 205). Other early plays, such as ' Ted's Cathedral ' ( First Night , BBC, tx. 28/3/1964) and ' Close the Coalhouse Door ' ( The Wednesday Play , BBC, tx. 22/10/1969), were first staged in the theatre and subsequently made into radio and television plays: "I think it was Henry Livings always said that's what a proper professional writer should do. He said if it's a good idea give it a whirl and maximise your earning potential." (Cooke, 2004) In 1963 Plater wrote his first series episodes when he was asked to write for Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78): "At that time being invited to join the Z Cars team was like a papal blessing.