Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a man who says he's excited by a blank sheet of paper.

He's been filling hundreds of them very successfully since the early 60s, writing for radio,

television, the theatre and the cinema.

He served his apprenticeship in television in the dangerous days of live drama.

He was the author of Z-Kars and after that softly softly. Then he widened his field to include

situation comedy and series like The

Barchester Chronicles and latterly fortunes of war. He's won many awards for his work

but success has not altered his plain tastes and plain talk. He likes snooker and soccer,

and he calls himself a craftsman rather than an artist.

He is Alan Plater.

Alan, is that the work ethic in you that fiddling about with words isn't really a man's job?

I think it's a combination of things.

I'm descended from a generation, several generations of craftsmen.

My father was apprentices of blacksmith in the shipyards. My grandfather was a steel worker.

I've got a huge respect for things that are made and the word playwright is

spelled the same as wheelwright or shipwright and a play is made. It is not written. It's made in a rehearsal room and on the stage of a theatre or in a studio.

So that's part of it. The other thing is I get very worried about people who have a condition known as art in the head, the idea that I'm going to make some art.

In other words, Michelangelo was just saying, I'm going to make a really good job of this ceiling so that people will

be pleased with what I've done.

...