Although the gritty northern procedurals of Z Cars and Softly Softly, Task Force were Plater's first area of operation, he could also turn his hand to costume drama. It was Plater who adapted Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles in 1982. For perhaps the first time, the BBC deployed the lavish production values married to star casting to produce the kind of drama that would become a fixture in the schedules. Here is a clip from the opening episode.
A Very British Coup (1988), adapted from Chris Mullin's novel, was a gripping Thatcher-era moral conspiracy thriller in which the country's Far Left government is ousted by the forces of darkness.
Why should novelists write for the theatre? Plater must have enjoyed writing this scene from Selected Exits (1992), a dramatisation of the life of the Welsh novelist Gwyn Thomas starring Anthony Hopkins. Here Thomas is persuaded by the Royal Court to try his hand at playwriting.
And to prove that Plater didn't simply write about men, here is a scene from The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a delicious serving of bitter-sweet nostalgia in which Judi Dench looks back to her halcyon years as a young saxophonist in an all-girl swing band performing in London clubs during the Blitz.
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