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. I mean the show had been on a year and it was the biggest thing that had ever hit British television" (Cooke, 2004). He wrote 18 episodes for the series between 1963 and 1965 and followed it with another 30 episodes for spin-off Softly, Softly (subsequently Softly, Softly - Task Force , BBC, 1966-76). While writing for Z Cars Plater also wrote his first scripts for ITV , with two episodes for Crane (1963-65), an action-adventure series featuring Patrick Allen , a play called ' Fred ' (tx. 18/5/64) for the Granada anthology series A Question of Happiness , the opening credits of which were notable for including a picture of the writer alongside his name (a sign of the preferential treatment given to writers at this time) and ' Three to a Cell ' (tx. 15/1/1965) for the Granada crime series The Villains . The latter was the first of 14 Plater scripts televised in 1965 - a sign of an increasing productivity and versatility as a television dramatist that he was to sustain for many years. Of the other scripts, ten were Z Cars episodes, one was an episode for Front Page Story , an ATV drama series set in the newspaper world, another was a play called ' The Nutter ' (tx. 5/12/1965), and the other was a surreal play for ABC 's Armchair Theatre called ' The Incident ' (ITV, tx. 24/5/1965): "It was one of my first overtly political dramas, The Incident . The proposition was that because of the growing unemployment and deprivation in the north of England they'd actually built a kind of wall across the country and this was about people who were trying to infiltrate over the border. It was very strange and weird. " The common ingredient in all these scripts was their 'northernness': Z Cars was set in Lancashire, The Villains was set in the North West, The Nutter was one of a trilogy of plays called Portraits From The North for BBC2 's Theatre 625 (1964-68), and ' The Incident ', which explicitly dramatised the north/south divide, was made for ABC , the regional ITV company which provided the weekend service for the Midlands and the North. In 1968 his trilogy To See How Far It Is was shown as part of Theatre 625 (BBC, 1964-68), and in the same year he created and wrote a series called The First Lady (BBC, 1968-69) featuring Thora Hird as a crusading local councillor. David Rose produced the series, and when Rose was appointed Head of BBC English Regions Drama at Birmingham in 1971 he became an important patron for Plater, commissioning distinctively 'regional' drama such as ' Land of Green Ginger ' ( Play for Today , BBC, tx. 15/1/1973), set in Plater's home town of Hull, the six-part Trinity Tales (BBC, 1975), an updating of Chaucer 's Canterbury Tales featuring a group of rugby league supporters travelling to a cup final at Wembley, the six-part Middlemen (BBC, 1977), featuring Frank Windsor and Francis Matthews , and The Fosdyke Saga (BBC, tx. 20/7/1977), a northern parody of The Forsyte Saga adapted from the stage play written by Plater with the cartoonist Bill Tidy . As if he didn't already have enough to do, Plater wrote his first film scripts in the 1970s, beginning with D.H. Lawrence 's The Virgin and the Gypsy (d. Christopher Miles, 1970), followed by Juggernaut (d. Richard Lester, 1974), for which he was called on to write additional dialogue, and It Shouldn't Happen To A Vet (d. Eric Till, 1976), based on James Herriot 's books about a Yorkshire vet. While Plater did not abandon single plays or series, serials began to feature more in his writing from the mid 1970s. In the same year that he wrote Trinity Tales he also adapted A.J. Cronin 's novel about industrial unrest in the north east in the early years of the 20th century, The Stars Look Down (ITV, 1975), as a 13-part serial. Another major adaptation, this time for BBC2, was The Barchester Chronicles (1982), a seven-part dramatisation of two novels by Anthony Trollope . Alongside these adaptations, Plater began to create his own original serials in the 1970s and 80s. Get Lost! (ITV, 1981), about two teachers who get involved in missing-person mysteries, was a trial run for the Beiderbecke trilogy, three serials featuring Trevor Chaplin ( James Bolam ) and Jill Swinburne ( Barbara Flynn ), schoolteachers-cum-amateur detectives who get caught up in mysterious plots involving political corruption and state secrecy, with Trevor's enthusiasm for the music of the 1920s jazz band leader, Bix Beiderbecke , the initial catalyst for the events that follow. Music has always been an important element in Plater's work. On some occasions it is central, as in the political musical ' Close the Coalhouse Door '; the Beiderbecke trilogy; the musical drama Curriculee, Curricula (BBC, tx. 22/5/1978), on which Plater collaborated with the musician Dave Greenslade ; Misterioso (BBC, tx. 25/7/1991), which takes its name from the late 1950s jazz album by Thelonious Monk ; ' Doggin' Around ' ( Screen One , BBC, tx. 16/10/1994), in which Elliot Gould plays an ageing American jazz musician playing gigs in the north of England; and The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (BBC, tx.3/9/2000), in which a saxophonist ( Judi Dench ) resurrects the all-female band she used to play in during the Second World War. Even where music is not central to the plot, the influence of musical rhythms and structures can often be detected in Plater's drama. As he suggested in his 1977 Theatre Quarterly article, he finds music in the cadence and dialect of the human voice. His scripts, which are character- based rather than plot-driven, are invariably loosely structured, developing and progressing like jazz improvisations rather than composed scores: "I think increasingly, over the years, I cultivated an instinctive approach which is probably akin to that of a jazz musician, improvising. I know I've got to fill 12 bars, like in a 12-bar blues, I know what the tune is, I don't know exactly what notes I'm going to play." Plater continued to combine writing for television, radio, theatre and the cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. A seven-part adaptation of Olivia Manning 's Balkan novels saw him taking the Second World War as his subject in Fortunes of War (BBC, 1987), featuring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson , while the three-part A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988), adapted from the novel by Chris Mullin and featuring Ray McAnally , was a contemporary political thriller. Meanwhile Plater wrote another three screenplays for feature films in the 1980s. Two were about D.H.Lawrence : Priest of Love (d. Christopher Miles, 1981) and Coming Through (d. Peter Barber-Fleming, 1985), while The Inside Man ( Slagskämpen , Sweden, 1984) was based on a real-life incident during the Cold War when a Soviet submarine was spotted in Swedish waters. There was no discernable falling-off in Plater's prolific output in the 1990s. As well as the jazz-influenced Misterioso and ' Doggin' Around ', he wrote Frank Stubbs: Mr Chairman (BBC, tx. 8/8/1994), the five-part Oliver's Travels (BBC, 1995), a three-part adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel, Simisola (ITV, 1996), episodes for popular drama series such as Maigret (ITV, 1992-93) and Dalziel and Pascoe (BBC, 1996-2007), and a screenplay for Keep the Aspidistra Flying (d. Robert Bierman, 1997), from the novel by George Orwell , who was the subject of an earlier television play by Plater, Orwell on Jura (BBC, tx. 20/12/1983). The Last of the Blonde Bombshells , an episode of Midsomer Murders (ITV, 1997-) and the single drama Belonging (ITV, tx. 12/9/2004), based on a novel by Stevie Davies saw Plater's television work enter a fifth decade, without abandoning the themes and interests of his previous work. He also continued to write for radio and the theatre - a five-part BBC radio series, Abandoned Projects (2005), humorously documented his many unrealised projects. He received the Dennis Potter Award at BAFTA in 2004 and a CBE in the 2005 New Year's Honours List. Among his final works, The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two-Sheds (tx. 17/1/2006) was a highlight of BBC Birmingham 's Afternoon Play series (2004-07), and he wrote four feature-length episodes for Lewis (ITV, 2007-10), the last of which, 'Your Sudden Death Question', was transmitted just a month before Plater's own death. Lewis 's star, Kevin Whately , was to feature in the posthumously transmitted Joe Maddison's War (ITV, tx. 19/9/2010), as a Geordie shipyard worker who joins the Home Guard in 1939 with his friend Harry ( Robson Green ). It was perhaps fitting that Plater's final television drama should be set in the North East, his birthplace and an area which had a lasting influence on the career of one of Britain's most distinctive and prolific television dramatists. Bibliography Cooke, Lez (2004), Unpublished interview with Alan Plater, 11 June Sean Day-Lewis (1998), 'Alan Plater', in Talk of Drama: views of the television dramatist now and then (University of Luton Press) Plater, Alan (1977), 'Twenty-Five Years Hard: a Playwright's Personal Retrospective', Theatre Quarterly , No.25, Spring Plater, Alan (2003), 'Learning the Facts of Life: Forty Years as a TV Dramatist', New Theatre Quarterly , 19:3, August Plater, Alan (2006), Doggin' Around (Northway) Professor Jen Wilson. Jen Wilson was born and brought up in Mount Pleasant in Swansea. She is a self-taught jazz pianist and accomplished jazz musician and composer, writer and archivist. For 50 years or more Jen has played a central role in promoting jazz music in Wales and in documenting its history and social impact – and in particular the role of women in jazz. In the early 1980s Jen joined the Swansea Women’s History Group as she became increasingly aware that ordinary women weren’t visible in mainstream history and jazzwomen didn’t feature in cultural histories. Jen’s local research contributed knowledge of African American cultural interchange from the 1850s, e.g. café society and women’s bands featured in the 2016 ‘How jazz came to Wales exhibition’ in Swansea Museum. Jen founded the registered charity Women in Jazz in 1986, continuing to add to her collection of oral histories, jazz sheet music, books, artefacts and records. Dame Cleo Laine became patron in 2003. Notably her work has inspired radio programmes such as Alan Plater’s 3-part drama for BBC Radio 4 (1991) ‘Devil’s Music’ and Radio 4’s ‘The Lost Women of British Jazz’, which was nominated for the Prix Europa in 2015 and came fifth. She was awarded the WCVA Wales Volunteer of the Year 2014, and the Point of Light Award from Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015. She has also been appointed Honorary Professor of Practice by University of Wales Trinity St David in 2016. Don Warrington. Don Warrington, MBE (born May 23, 1951) is a Trinidadian British actor. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours. Contents. Early Life [ edit | edit source ] Warrington was born in Trinidad but as a young child went with his mother to England, where he was raised in Newcastle upon Tyne. His father, Basil Kydd, was a Trinidadian politician who died in 1958. He trained as an actor at the Drama Centre London. He started acting in repertory theatre at the age of seventeen. Career [ edit | edit source ] Warrington is chiefly known for playing Philio Smith in Rising Damp, from 1974 to 1978, alongside Leonard Rossiter and Richatd Beckinsale. Warrington appeared in the crime drama C.A.T.S. Eyes, as government contact Nigel Beaumont; in Impact Earth (2007) playing General Harris; and in New Street Law as Judge Ken Winyard. In 1993 Warrington played television reporter Graham Gaunt in To Play The King, the second part of the BBCs House Of Cards trilogy. Currently Warrington is playing the lead role of Joe Keller, in an all-black revival of Arthur Miller's (The Crucible) tragedy, "All my Sons" at the Manchester Royal Exchange. He has had smaller roles in many programmes including: Red Dwarf, Lovejoy, Manchild and Diamond Geezer. He portrayed the villainous founder of Time Lord society, Rassilon, in several Doctor Who episode "Rise of the Cybermen" (2006). Soon after, he recorded an abridged audio book of the Doctor Who novel The Art of Destruction by Stephen Cole. Warrington has performed with the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bristol Old Vic. He is one of the interviewees on the BBC2 series Grumpy Old Men, and he appears in a series of Kenco coffee advertisements in the United Kingdom in which he plays an African coffee plantation owner. He regularly provides voice-overs for both BBC TV and radio. He also starred in BBC1 sitcom The Crouches, which aired from 9 September 2003 until 2005. He played Bailey, who was Roly's boss at a London Underground station in South London. Roly was played by Robbie Gee. He played the role of the Hospital Chaplain in Casualty, assuming the role of Trevor. He also starred in the 2010 film It's a Wonderful Afterlife. He has provided voiceover links, reading out the various methods of contacting the show on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2, which has been broadcast since 11 January 2010. He also appeared as jazz musician Frederick J. Louden in a BBC radio production of The Devil's Music, written by Alan Plater. In 2011, Warrington played the father of a suspected terrorist in the last series of the BBC drama Waking the Dead. He is currently in the new BBC show Death in Paradise, playing a Caribbean police Commissioner. Warrington competed in the sixth series of Strictly Come Dancing, partnered with the 2005 and 2006 British National Champion in Latin American dance, Lilia Kopylova. After Week 4, Warrington was joint seventh out of the remaining 12 contestants with an average of 24.5 points. In Week 5 he was eliminated, having lost the dance-off against Heather Small, with the first three judges all voting for Small over Warrington. He joined the show in order to step out of his comfort zone, and he appreciated the opportunity to learn to dance.