It was very sad to hear of Alan Plater’s passing last week. A writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue whose theatre and TV career spanned over 40 years, and a lovely man by all accounts. I first discovered him as a kid because my dad was obsessed with The Beiderbecke Affair, and A Very British Coup is also well worth digging up on DVD. If you’ve got an hour to spare there’s an extensive interview with him at the British Library’s Theatre Archive project.

Alan Plater had a long association with BBC Birmingham, and you can see two of the films he wrote for them at mac this weekend. The first, Land Of Green Ginger, is a 1973 Play For Today which used an evocative Hull street name for its title. It was the first time Plater had been given free rein to to write a film set in his hometown, and includes choice lines like “Bugger shopping. I was only going for a bag of sugar and a bit of scandal.” The second was made over thirty years later and has another distinctive title: The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two Sheds. It stars Likely Lad and Beiderbecke collaborator James Bolam, and was filmed on Birmingham allotments. The producers of both films, David Rose and Will Trotter, will be present at the screenings.

Alan Plater (15 April 1935 – 25 June 2010)

After our Mobile Cinema event last month we were alerted to a lovely project in the south-west. A few years ago a rusty Bedford cinema van was retrieved from a field in Devon and has been carefully restored to tour the region showing archive films.

A fleet of seven of these were commissioned by Tony Benn when he was at the Ministry of Technology in the 60s. That perspex cockpit would originally have housed the 16mm projector, beaming the image onto a screen on the van’s back door for up to 28 punters at a time. Now it seats 22, and uses HD digital projection and 7.1 Dolby sound. We want one!

Cinemas on wheels have a long pedigree in the UK, from fairground bioscopes in the 1900s right up to Highlands juggernaut The Screen Machine. Taking their lead from the kino trains they’ve often had a political purpose, whether it be the workers agit prop of Cinema Action or ‘Touring Talkies’ bringing Labour propaganda to the masses, pictured below. (Sample slogan: ‘WOMEN VOTE LABOUR – FOR THE CHILDRENS SAKE’)

A few more up-to-date examples:
- Video activists Undercurrents have got into the mobile cinema game with a refitted caravan:
- A group in Market Harborough decided against a fixed building and are trying to raise the money to renovate a portable unit;
- Flicks in the Sticks recently celebrated ten years of bringing movies to village halls across Shropshire and Herefordshire.
- and Volvo are bank-rolling a touring drive-in.

Supposedly it’s our quiet time, but there’s loads going on. Including…

> 7INCH no.38 – Old-school gaming special
Hare and Hounds, Sunday 27 June

> IT CAME FROM PEBBLE MILL – 70s drama extravaganza
MAC, 2-4 July

> GREEN MAN FESTIVAL – big-top fun
Glanusk Park, 20-22 August

Plus other possible August gigs at the Big Chill and in Manchester shaping up, more on which shortly, and I’m making a slight return to academia to give a paper on ‘cinema’s ongoing love affair with its own demise’, in Leicester in July. And remarkably enough we’ve been nominated for the Hospital 100, an annual run-down on creative Britain’s ones to watch. Make our mums proud, and chuck us your vote!