Appreciations: Alan Plater obituary
Alan Plater (obituary, 26 June) was a writer's writer. He combined an industry with an ease and fluency that was not only incredibly rare, but almost painfully irksome to any other writer in his orbit. Writing a scene or structuring an act just seemed easier for Alan than it was for the rest of us. I think that having studied architecture may have helped. His structural thinking was always for a human purpose. In his work, as in his life, what he did was to create space for people; to be themselves, to live well.
He was constantly concerned about other writers, not just through his work at the Writers Guild, but for his endless commitment to fledgling playwrights like myself. After reading my very first play, he stayed a steadfast mentor and friend. For the trouble he got me out of and all the good fortune he inspired, I am enormously in his debt.
So many of us owe our start to Alan. Anthony Minghella told me how as a terrified student he was buttonholed by Alan, who said: "Listen, son, you are a writer, don't even think about doing anything else."
It often seemed Alan took more pride in those he helped than he did in his own work – perhaps because his own success came so naturally to him. You just grew to expect that he'd always have another series commissioned, another play about to rehearse. For as long as I knew him he was never without a cigarette, something in production and his beloved Shirley by his side.
What we all love about Alan's work is its humanity. But what seems most remarkable to me was how he so easily combined a tolerance of human foibles with an unshakable sense of political commitment. His socialism was instinctive, never dogmatic or doctrinaire – it was the wisdom of common sense. He seemed to embody a clear-sightedness and lack of pretension from a bygone age, of which we are now all bereft.
The extent of his credits is staggering, and his stamp on what we can see now as a golden age of television is indelible. His commitment to regional theatre in Hull, Newcastle, Stratford East, Orkney and beyond was extraordinary. But for all the myriad awards and prodigious list of productions, it is for his amused humility, in his life as in his art, that I most hold him dear. Typically, he used to say to me that a good play must constantly have a surface liveliness masking a modest profundity. But in his case I disagree. There was nothing modest about Alan's achievement.
Lee Hall
Alan and I were educated at the Kingston high school, Hull, then a grammar school. We were both 11-plus boys. He was two years ahead of me, and it was not until his sixth-form days that I came under his spell.
He was the spiritual head of a gang that called themselves the Old Kingstonian Society of Genii, or Oksog. To my great joy and the annoyance of the lads in my year I was allowed to join. The aim of the society was to be humorous and laid-back. Alan invented a character called Wullfric Hatrack – I remember his name but not his function. He was also very fond of gently mocking Mr Hicks, who ran the cricket team, by constantly reiterating "it's a green 'un".
Alan was a wonderful draughtsman (he left school in 1953 to study architecture) and I was able to remind him only a couple of a weeks ago of a cartoon he drew – a road sign saying "diversion" surrounded by a group of workmen happily singing, dancing and playing various musical instruments.
Although terribly, terribly ill, he kept his sense of fun to the end. He delighted in the hand-held control with which he moved his huge invalid chair. "It's the only way I can move now," he said with his writer's detachment, "I'm like a sack of coal."
A sweeter man I have never known.
Tom Courtenay