shirley rubinstein

B-E-I-D…

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“You’re part of it now.”

The now late Shirley Rubinstein, wife of writer Alan Plater, said that to me ten years ago. My book with the long title, “BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair” was just coming out and Beiderbecke meant more to her than it did even to me. “The Beiderbecke Affair” is a 1980s ITV drama by Alan Plater and both he and Shirley have told me that it, plus its sequels, is really “Alan and Shirley having adventures”.

This is a case of maybe you’ve heard of “The Beiderbecke Affair” and maybe you haven’t. But it’s also a case where if you have heard of it, if you do know it, it’s something personal to you, you don’t think anyone else has heard of it. It isn’t six one-hour episodes that were a hit watched by millions, it is two characters, Trevor Chaplin and Average-Sized Mrs Swinburne, it is two friends of yours.

More than two, there’s Big Al and Little Norm as well. Later on there is the character with my favourite name in the entirety of television drama: “Peterson – the Man with No Name”.

Even this week, someone said that they thought they were the only person who knew this show. And for some years after the book came out, I would be contacted by Beiderbecke fans who thought exactly the same thing. One of them sent me a Google map with all of the show’s filming locations marked out and he seemed so pleased that I’d be as interested as he was in it.

Right from the first showing in 1985, “The Beiderbecke Affair” had this way of gluing you to it like a fan, but also cocooning you in the story, in the Beiderbecke world, like it was just you, Jill and Trevor, not millions of others.

Watch it now – a peculiarly edited version is on BritBox and they won’t tell me why they’ve cut the bits they have – and I think it’s still seductive. It’s a drama series in which nothing seems to happen, yet not because it’s a piece of Sunday night light fluff. I suppose it’s gentle, but again that’s now a pejorative word for me and brings to mind empty dramas where the baddies always get their comeuppance. Alan Plater wrote once that he preferred dramas to be about people being, living, not thrown into melodramatic situations. Beiderbecke is a slice of Jill and Trevor’s life, and it’s only by the end of six episodes that you really register just how very much has happened.

Six episodes. With ad breaks, that’s considerably less than six hours of television drama and I’m still writing about it 37 years later. Quite right too.

Shirley was obviously aware of the impact of the show, she’d had the fans and the letters. I’m proud of the fact that – although I’ve forgotten how this could possibly have come about – I am the reason Alan Plater got a fan letter from Chris Beiderbecke, grandson or later of the musician, Bix Beiderbecke.

When Shirley said I was part of it now, I felt so proud. I can see her saying it to me, holding a copy of the book.

“You’re part of it now,” she said. “Whenever anyone looks for The Beiderbecke Affair, whenever anyone even just Googles the word ‘Beiderbecke’, your book will come up.”

“If they can spell Beiderbecke,” I said.

I drove by my childhood last night

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Didn’t mean to. I did have to mark an occasion of sorts yesterday, but that was for later. Mid-evening I was driving to a familiar place through a less familiar route and at unfamiliar time.

Also, there were quite a lot of roadworks, including one set of temporary traffic lights that caught me outside what is now a Subway, but was once a bank. Through dusk and red lights, I could just see me going to that bank as a boy. It wasn’t to do any banking, you’re not looking at any kind of fiscally responsible man then or now, but instead it was part of the very best and certainly the most elaborate school trip I got to go on.

No, not part. Whole. That was the entire thing, a geography trip to this bank. It was a trip that in round figures was a stroll, easily contained within a single lesson. But last night, I could again see why we were marched off to it.

For down very low on the bank’s wall, where thirty of us once had to take turns crouching down to see, and where last night I had to sit up a bit to see over a bollard, there is a crow’s foot mark. It’s an Ordnance Survey marker, and it’s to do with establishing a base line in order to measure the height of hills and buildings.

Before I could remember what height I would’ve been back then, traffic moved on now and – perhaps not surprisingly – I was then driving by my old school. We didn’t get on, my school and I, but there is something about it still being there that is practically haunting.

As there was with this. The reason for the new route was that I was required to pick up a fish and chip supper. The chip shop I was directed to turns out to be very proud of the fact that it opened the year I was born. The year is on signs and everything.

So for every minute I have lived, for every thing I have done and thought and said, this chip shop has been a living business, a going concern, and for a moment it felt like it had been expecting me for all these years.

That’s probably not why a woman working there said “Sorry for the wait”.

Much later last night, I marked this occasion that I needed to mark and if I did it without looking back quite as far as school afternoons, still it was a whole bunch of looking back. I did this thing by watching Alan Plater’s “Doggin’ Around”. You can catch that on YouTube if you look in the right corners but – get me – my copy is from the BBC’s own archives. Which doesn’t sound relevant, does sound suspicious, but turned out to be poke-in-the-eye relevant for literally every second of the film.

For the BBC archive’s viewing copies of shows from the 1990s are effectively ROTs, Recordings of Transmissions. You don’t just get the show itself, you get the continuity announcements either end because BBC just recorded the whole output and later chopped it up into the shows. So it’s like you’re back watching on the night.

Except BBC archive viewing copies also have a timecode burnt in. I’m used to that from preview tapes, but this was not a clock showing the running time, it was a clock and a calendar showing exactly when “Doggin’ Around” aired. Precisely.

It was on BBC1 starting at 22:06:30 and on, it says here and throughout the film, the date 16-10-94. Ended 23:36:17.

By chance, I watched it at pretty close to those same times now, 27 years, 4 months and 26 days later. I watched it now on an iPad in my bath and simultaneously, it felt, in 1994 on a Mac in my rented London flat where I appeared to live on pizza bread, waffles and sweetcorn.

At about 23:36:18 on 16-10-94, I know I phoned Alan Plater to say how much I had enjoyed it. Three decades later on 10-3-22, I know I wanted to phone you to say the same thing.

But.

I’m also really not ready to look back in quite so much detail. It seems that the past can be a more lovely place to visit than I’d have thought, but, god, I don’t want to live there.

With or without a timecode.

So let’s you and I consider this as occasions marked and moved on from. It’s time to do something new.

Time’s table

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I did not realise how a table can soak up the people who sat at it, can eat up all of the events that surrounded it, and then release them all again like a battery. I was going to say I hadn’t realised this happens until just about now, a couple of days ago.

But what I really realised this week was that every time I think of Shirley Rubinstein and Alan Plater, I think of them at a particular table. It was a dinner table, longer than it was wide, and I ate with them at it many times, but we also just talked there a lot.

Alan died in 2010 and when Shirley died in 2017 and I was at the funeral, I was standing by that table when I asked to go see Alan’s office one last time. That was a tremendous space, you’d love it: just saying that makes it sound large and I don’t mean that, I mean it was perfect. Somehow a split-level office, with Alan writing in the lower part, Shirley working in the upper. You had to go through Shirley’s bit to step down into Alan’s and even visiting it, it felt like climbing down into a nest.

Just stepping down into it, you felt ready to write.

That split level office must surely still be there, though I’ve no idea who lives in that house now or what they may have done with the office. But the split-level part, that has to still be there.

Whereas I thought the table was gone forever.

Earlier this week, though, I was at a school and by more chance and social media algorithms than I’d have thought possible, an old friend found out I was going. And that I would therefore be about 15 minutes away from this woman I hadn’t seen in so long. Hadn’t seen since Shirley’s funeral in 2017.

I might even forgive Facebook’s machinations for how it meant I ended up having a great time with her. But throughout the afternoon, as deep into conversation and tea as I was, there was also this.

She now has Alan and Shirley’s table.

I choked when she told me.

I stroked it, actually stroked it. And absolutely had to sit at the same spot I used to.

Days later, telling you, I’m actually teary.

Shirley Rubinstein

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Alan Plater and Shirley RubinsteinMy 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.

It happened on my watch

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An editor I particularly liked working for once told me she knew I was serious about what I did because of my watch. This was Helen Hackworthy on Radio Times and she is smart. She’s the only editor who ever spotted that I signed off emails with a capital W when things were fine and a lowercase w when they really, really, really were not.

What she’d also seen was that when I’d sit down at that BBC desk, I would take off my watch and place it next to the keyboard. She saw that as my being conscious of time, determined to get things done, all sorts of professional things that I’d love to have been correct and I hope weren’t entirely wrong.

But they were a bit wrong.

Quite a lot wrong.

I used to take it off because that watch had a metal strap and it kept scraping against the keyboard.

I remember this, I know this, I remember Helen and I talking about it, I remember her laughing when I explained but I cannot remember that watch. I’ve had many watches over the years and – exactly like you, admit this now – I haven’t worn one regularly since I got a mobile phone.

Somewhere in the set of watches I’ve had there was that one with the metal strap and I know there was a Casio thing in the early 80s because the same watch is a plot point in the 1983 movie Blue Thunder. That was a helicopter adventure, an aerial paranoid thriller and apparently it’s going to be remade now with drones instead of the chopper. This is either modernising the tale or making it cheaper.

But of all the watches in all the bars in all the towns, there are three that matter to me. And they’re all in this shot.

watches

The one on the left there with the brown leather strap is the watch I was wearing when I first met Alan Plater and Shirley Rubinstein in the late 1980s. They became friends of mine but then, on that day, I was just meeting and interviewing Alan. I was all kinds of nervous: not just because he was already a writing hero to me but because this was my first big interview with anyone.

That man was so interesting in that interview that 25 years later or so, quotes from it were used in a set of DVD liner notes and about five years further on, I used quotes from it myself for my first book.

But for all that, there was this: the watch stopped working soon after I met Alan. I don’t know how to blame him but I do. Except that I kept the watch because of him and I quietly wore it again just one more time at his funeral in 2010.

See the watch in the middle of that shot? The one that looks like it says ‘now’ underneath the watch face hands? It does say now but it’s not underneath anything: there are no hands. That is it. The word now. I have to tell you, it is the most accurate watch I’ve ever had. Never have to wind it, either.

I do think it’s been losing a little time lately but I still wore it because I like it and because it was given to me by Angela.

But then it would be Angela who pointed out a few months ago that this watch’s time was up, so to speak, that its days were numbered. She said that as soon as the existence of the third one in that shot was announced. It’s an Apple Watch and I could do you a review here but instead let’s just take one fact about it.

Apart from the Now watch which I’ve worn a lot yet far from constantly, I have not had a regular watch since I got my phone in 1997. That’s over. I have a watch again and it has slipped into my life as if I’ve always had it on me.

My watches up to now, where I can remember them, have been reminders of things that have happened or of people who matter to me. Now my Apple Watch actually reminds me of things I have to make happen and it is how I keep in touch with those people. Quite literally keep in touch as you can send tap, tap, taps to fellow Apple Watch owners.

But it will also always remind me of buying Angela one at the same time. It will remind me of how hers came ages before mine. And now it will remind me of talking about this with you.

Don’t tell anyone that bit about my only taking my watch off because it scratches, okay? Who knows, maybe other editors projected qualities on to me like that.

Shelve your ideas

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So some preposterous number of years ago, I interviewed Alan Plater at his then home, a spectacular flat in London. I was very young and rather nervous but wowed by how massive this place was and, especially, how full of bookshelves he and his wife Shirley Rubinstein had it. I wanted the flat, I wanted the bookshelves.

I particularly wanted the bookshelves. I’m not sure I could’ve vocalised this then, I suspect I just drooled, but it seemed a pretty perfect kind of place to live in.

Did I mention the size?

I came away thinking that London flats are superb and that bookshelves are fantastic. I was right about one of those things. While Alan and Shirley’s flat was glorious, it was actually two flats. They were knocked together into one long one and in fact few people in London live like that.

Shirley and Alan became close friends of mine after this but I never went back to that flat. They moved to a gorgeous house – and this time the knocking through and building on turned it into an even more gorgeous house with more levels and rooms and crinkly corners than can truly be appreciated in one sitting. Oh, and book shelves. Lots and lots of bookshelves.

I’ve just realised: when I watch Grand Designs or lesser property shows, my lip does curl just a little at those houses that have no bookshelves. Not fit for purpose, if you ask me.

But I like that I never went back to that flat. It makes that place and that moment a specific little bubble. I’ve never been one for lusting after houses and cars – possibly I have a bit for some Apple gear but give me a break here – but those shelves, that bubble, I wanted it. It felt inextricably bound up in what I wanted my career to be. I did lust after being a writer, even as I thought that was something other people did. Not me. Couldn’t be me.

Turns out, it could.

And all of this came back to me this week as I did a mentoring session over Skype. (I do mentoring for The Blank Screen and Other Stories now. It’s a thing.) During the natter, there was an oooh. Look at the shelves behind William.

I turned around, winced at how I’d forgotten to tidy up, but there they were.

Floor to ceiling bookshelves. Crammed.

Nowhere near as organised as Shirley and Alan’s, but bookshelves aplenty and akimbo.

I haven’t thought about this much in recent years but I’m thinking about it today. Because I look at those shelves of mine and I want them. Just as I wanted Alan and Shirley’s, all that time ago.

And I’ve got them.

A couple of them have copies of my books.

How in the world did that happen?