Alan Plater salutes John Hopkins
The key programmes in the history of television drama tend to list themselves: The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness, Boys from the Blackstuff and the plays of Jack Rosenthal. But as the years drift by, too many of the early pioneers are forgotten. The late John Hopkins, who bestrode our world in the 1960s and early 70s, was such a pathfinder and it's right that his work is being celebrated with a season at the National Film Theatre in May.
From 1963 until 1966, Hopkins was lead writer and script editor for Z Cars, the programme that turned cop shows inside out. From the first episode the series - largely inspired by Troy Kennedy Martin and John McGrath - won huge audiences and most of the awards then available. Set in Newtown, a fictional version of Kirkby, near Liverpool - chosen because it had the highest crime rate in the land - it showed the police as fallible and flawed; they often didn't get their man. Failure to close the case was, in television terms, revolutionary; in Z Cars it was almost compulsory.
It was thanks to Z Cars that Hopkins and I became friends. He called my agent, Peggy Ramsey, to see if I would write for the show. We met in a bar in St Martin's Lane. I was in awe, a northern boy down in the big city. Hopkins was a home counties chap who'd been to Oxford, as had many of the key people in the business, which puzzled me then, and still does. He talked quietly, with great precision. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Over the next couple of years I wrote 18 episodes of Z Cars. I was no slouch at the keyboard but amazingly, over the same period, Hopkins wrote 57 episodes, plus a couple of plays and his quartet, Talking to a Stranger, hailed at the time by George Melly as "the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television". Shown on the fledgling BBC2 in 1966, starring Margery Mason, Maurice Denham, Michael Bryant and Judi Dench, and directed by Christopher Morahan, Talking to a Stranger describes a Sunday in the life of a suburban family. The seismic event at the centre of the drama is the suicide of the mother, with each of the four plays examining the same events from the point of view of one of the protagonists.
It was strictly of its time. Studio-based, the scenes are long, shot multi-camera and give the audience something totally unique to that tradition: the sight of actors of the highest quality giving a continuous performance at a range of 6ft. The plays are long. The first three run 96 minutes each and the final one is 102 minutes, irregularly shaped drama being regarded as part of the public service tradition.
It was also part of the tradition to treat television writers like artists. Hopkins told me that when he was commissioned, all he had in his head was the last line of the final play: Mother's "Somebody hold me." He also confessed that he was seven months late delivering the scripts.
Hopkins was way ahead of the game in writing about dysfunctional families; about racism, in both Z Cars and his 1965 play Fable; about sexuality, in Horror of Darkness, also in 1965, starring Nicol Williamson and Glenda Jackson; and about police brutality, in his stage play, This Story of Yours. Despite the breadth of his work, he insisted it all began with Z Cars and he would head to the north-west regularly for a fix of life on the Kirkby streets. "I heard something wonderful there last week," he would tell me. "I heard someone say, 'You wouldn't know it if you met it in your soup.'" The line duly turned up in an episode some weeks later.
His work was dark, at a time when that was a rare quality; but there was always the possibility of light. He was also a master of three-dot dialogue, the kind that, done badly, looks like this:
"All I'm trying to say is ..."
"... What?"
"Well, you know ... like ... oh, I don't know ..."
You can cobble this stuff by the yard; but Hopkins used it with precision to define characters struggling with painful emotions slightly out of reach.
A kind, gentle, intense and driven man, Hopkins took his work very seriously. We would talk long into the night about writing, but then he would go off at unpredictable tangents, enthusing one moment about the great Italian director Ermanno Olmi, the next about a group called the Honeycombs who had a number one hit in 1964.
He moved to the US in the early 1970s with his second wife, Shirley Knight (who will be attending some of the NFT screenings), and his work largely disappeared from our screens after he co-adapted Smiley's People with John Le Carré in 1982. He continued to work with distinction in America, writing Hiroshima, an award-winning television film from 1995, never shown in this country.
But he was never forgotten. In 1994, BBC2 celebrated its 40th anniversary. The then controller telephoned Alan Bleasdale to say they planned to repeat Boys from the Blackstuff because it was the most important piece of drama ever seen on the channel. "No it wasn't," Bleasdale replied. "Talking to a Stranger was." In the event, the BBC repeated both, the Hopkins quartet preceded by a short introduction from Bleasdale, in which he confessed these were the plays that inspired him to come out of the closet with his typewriter.
Hopkins died in 1998. We had last met a year or two earlier when I was in Los Angeles working on an abandoned project. We had supper on a terrace overlooked by the facade of the Hotel Mondrian. We talked about the old days, had a couple of cheerful moans and I mentioned I'd recently seen Troy Kennedy Martin. Hopkins smiled.
"He still owes me two Z Cars scripts" · © Alan Plater.
· The John Hopkins season is in rep at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, from today. Box office: 020-7928 3232.