The Gallery

If the name sounds familiar that's because the playwright Alan Plater has been penning dramas since 1962, when he got his first break on the TV series Z Cars. He's gone on record with his disappointment that, over the subsequent decades, middle-of-the-road TV dramas have been obliged to focus upon personal relationships, leaving no room for spicier extra ingredients like social comment.

This does not apply on radio, where writers are awarded so much more freedom. Plater's play is set in a supremely trendy art gallery in Tyneside. The only hiccup is that the staff are all 'mature' - they've been hired to tick the politically-correct quota box. This is a clever, comic poke at daft bureaucracy, in which age and experience trash fashion and beauty.

Here's a rumbustious comedy by the great Alan Plater about what happens when politics try bending the arts into an instrument of cultural regeneration. A new art gallery is opening in a big old warehouse on the site of a former shipyard in the North East. All of the attendants are, by council decree, mature locals. That means they are practical, earthy, experienced. It does not mean that they understand the aims and objectives of the gallery's director. They can solve the problems left behind by dodgy workmen but can't quite see the point of the project.

Another bull's-eye is hit by Alan Plater in a play which mixes black humour with social comment. The Gallery looks at the cavern that exists between the intentions of regional art curators and the people the art is meant to touch, represented by its workers, all descended from local miners and ship builders. Janice Acquah is particularly impressive as an increasingly desperate outreach worker watching as tins of anchovies explode, and the moment a cleaner hoovers up the installation, Ashes to Ashes, is also enjoyable. This is mayhem with added social comment.

I love Alan Plater's works - the Beiderbecke Trilogy DVDs of the Yorkshire TV comedy dramas starring James Bolam and Barbara Flynn have a permanent spot next to my DVD player. His new comic radio play follows the opening night of a new Tyneside art gallery, which is thrown into jeopardy by the well-meaning but ill-trained staff, who have all been hired to tick a 'quota' box.