Alan Plater - Plater On His Own Work

Plater On His Own Work

In an interview with Richard Whiteley, Plater claimed he had never intended to write sensational plot-driven sagas with outlandish characters and that he had never intended to make the sort of "rubbish programmes featuring high speed car crashes of which there are too many on television". Plater said that he had always tried to make his characters normal people, whose normal lives are interrupted when the outside world comes into their lives.

Plater claimed his two best-known characters, Trevor Chaplin and Jill Swinburne in the Beiderbecke series, were based on himself. Trevor represented his personal interests, jazz, football and snooker (the parallel of a Geordie in Yorkshire also fitted) while Jill represented his political beliefs such as conservationism, environmentalism and socialism. The couple were based on his earlier characters of Neville Keaton and Judy Threadgold in Get Lost! (1981).