obit | Self Distract

Alan Plater and Shirley Rubinstein My friend Shirley Rubinstein died this week. I keep staring at that sentence, pressing on the words, seeing if there’s any give in them, but there isn’t. Still, if her death is the jolt and the reason to want to talk to you about her, the friendship part also jolts me and also makes me want to talk.

I am like this with everyone. I think the odds of getting to know anyone in the slightest are impossibly low and becoming close with them are about as low again.

But I’ve known Shirley since the mid-1980s when – no, hang on a second. Let me back up a moment.

I loathe describing or identifying someone by naming their husband or wife. If you ever tell me about a partner or an ex or kids, well, I’m hardly going to be disinterested – but I will not have asked you unprompted. I’m interested in you, specifically you, and what you’re doing.

Yet in this one very particular case, I think naming Shirley’s partner is genuinely akin to naming her: she was married to the late Alan Plater. If you knew one, you knew the other. They were as close to being one person as I’ve known.

It would be simplistic but not entirely wrong to say that Alan Plater and Shirley Rubinstein were the Trevor Chaplin and Jill Swinburne of his Beiderbecke drama series. Actually, Alan was both Trevor and Jill together: their characters were both him. Yet when describing The Beiderbecke Affair and its descendants, Shirley would say they were all about “Alan and Shirley having adventures”.

That’s when I’ve known her from, from when I first interviewed him about The Beiderbecke Affair. And I have a strong, visual memory of being on their couch with their very heavy dog, The Duke, sitting on my feet, when Shirley brought Alan and I some tea. I remember it that clearly because she was surprised we’d got down to the interview so quickly and I thought, oooh, real interviewers must take longer. I have taken longer ever since.

The last time I saw Alan we got on to the topic of his book and TV drama Misterioso. The last time I saw Shirley I was rushing by her house returning a DVD she’d loaned me – of Misterioso.

It was a fast hug and run and it means that I will now also forever have a strong visual memory of her at her doorway.

That first time I met her, she trusted me with a pile of Christmas cards to pop in the post on my way home. The last-but-one time I met her, she trusted me with a book project she wanted done.

She was right to know I’d find a post box. I hope she’s right that I’ll do this well too.

In the 1970s I was a boy watching Blake’s 7 on the telly and for just a moment yesterday, I was again. How things change, though: I was in a TV studio being filmed when I heard that Gareth Thomas has died.

I never met him but I did interview the guy by phone twice. Once was for Radio Times in some kind of countdown feature about TV shows the magazine’s readers had said they wanted to see come back. It might’ve been 2004, maybe 2006, I don’t know. Still, I can see me at the RT desk on the phone to him, having a very happy conversation and only at the end of the twenty minutes or so asking him where he was.

“Tesco,” he said.

I don’t know why it tickled me that he was standing by the chiller cabinets in aisle 9 while being interviewed for Radio Times, but it did and somehow that all fitted into why I just liked the man.

Which means this next bit makes me wince. I can’t remember where Blake’s 7 came in that top ten, but I do remember that for some utter fluke of a chance, its whole section got missed. That top ten went to press and onto newsstands without number six or whatever it was. We ran an extended version online. It’s not the same.

Then in what now seems oddly related, I interviewed him again in 2013 for a book I was commissioned to write about Blake’s 7. I’m proud of that book and its 170,000 words –– seriously, who knew I could write that much about anything? –– but you can’t read it yet. It’s been rather severely delayed since I delivered the manuscript and I’m sure if I knew all the reasons why, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.

Obviously I’d rather it was out and obviously I wish you could read it but I think part of yesterday’s surprise at Thomas’s death is that he’s in this book of mine that is still in progress. How can he die before what he said to me is printed? What’s more, he’s now the second interviewee to die: I count myself privileged to have got to spend a whole hour on the phone with writer Tanith Lee shortly before she died too. She sent me a book we’d been talking about and I didn’t get to read it in time, I now cannot ever tell her what I thought.

Tanith Lee and Gareth Thomas: two names I knew from the TV credits when I was growing up. Two names I got to work with, at least in this small and short way. Neither of them would’ve recognised me on the street but it made yesterday’s news seem that much more of a shock. Cumulative shock.

Let me tell you this instead of dwelling on that. Right now I am at the same desk that I was when Gareth Thomas phoned me from backstage at some theatre tour. I can play back the recording: it’s right here on my Mac alongside the finished book. With one tap I can read the result of our chat and I can summon the man’s voice.

I’m not a Blake’s 7 fan, which on the one hand I think made me a good choice for the book but today also makes me regret that everything you’re hearing and reading about this actor concentrates on that one show. I’m doing it too, I’m doing the same thing instead of covering a giant career.

But I’m doing that because I’m going to do this. I’m going to show you a quote from my interview with Gareth Thomas. I’d heard before that he didn’t watch Blake’s 7 and I was curious whether that was because he wasn’t interested in it. At the time, I thought his answer pointed to a man very serious about his work. Today I’m thinking it hints at a man who was always moving forward, always pressing on, always reaching for something. And so what makes his death hurt is not that I remember him as Roj Blake or in that scary Children of the Stones, but rather that all this life and verve has stopped.

“Never seen the show,” he told me. And he didn’t want to. “I’ve never seen anything I’ve done. I’d hate it, I’d want to do it again properly, immediately. You can’t see yourself on stage so why bother on television?”