The Beiderbecke Affair: Which Way To Aristophanes Street?

Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) and Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam) break away from San Quentin High to go in search of Aristophanes Street...

It was a mysterious platinum blonde, selling mail order door to door in aid of the Cubs' football team, that drew local school teachers Jill Swinburne and Trevor Chaplin into a web of intrigue. Jazz enthusiast Trevor ordered a set of Bix Beiderbecke LPs from her. When the wrong records arrived, he set out to right things...

The trail initially led to an address in Aristophanes Street, but the mystery deepened when Trevor and Jill discovered that Aristophanes Street has been demolished just before they arrived...

And, in 2011, this led to an e-mail to '80s Actual from Chris:

I've been reading about Aristophanes Street, Leeds, on the Secret Leeds site, and wonder if it actually existed outside of the Beiderbecke Affair TV series of 1985. Have you any information? The street sign featured in the series looks very authentic.

Janey, the mysterious platinum blonde (Sue Jenkins)...

Aristophanes Street, Beiderbecke Land.

Alan Plater, the man who gave us the Beiderbecke Trilogy, invented Aristophanes Street, Chris. The street sign seen in The Beiderbecke Affair was created especially for the show. The Beiderbecke Affair was filmed in 1984 when some slum clearances were taking place in Leeds, and the production team selected one doomed road to pose as Aristophanes Street, filming there just after it was pulled down, with a derelict shop still standing on the corner to hold the sign.


Detective Sergeant Hobson (Dominic Jephcott) and Big Al (Terence Rigby) with some files.

Trevor discovers something rather sinister.

Read our main Beiderbecke Trilogy features here.

The Beiderbecke Trilogy - Jill Swinburne And Trevor Chaplin - Where Are They Now?

Trevor (James Bolam), Jill (Barbara Flynn) and First Born (Thomas McGlingly) - 1980s TV heaven!

Thomas has written:

I adored the 1980s TV series The Beiderbecke Trilogy and was saddened to hear of the death of the writer, Alan Plater. I connected with Jill, Trevor, Big Al, Little Norm, and the series was sheer brilliance. The 1980s setting was very important, because the show was very topical in its own distinctive way, but did Alan Plater write any more about Jill and Trevor? Have we any idea what happened to them next? This is keeping me awake nights!

I know what you mean, I think, Thomas!

I grew very fond of Jill, Trevor and company and I missed them - and their unique outlook on life - when the final series ended. Over the years since, I have often wondered how they are coping.

It would be so good to phone them up or drop them a line!

I've often been saddened by the ending of an enjoyable TV series and bemoaned the loss of weekly visits to favourite fictional characters via the little screen, but none more so than Jill and Trevor.

I watch the Trilogy every few years, never tire of it, always delighting in old acquaintance and fresh observations. But I always put off watching the final episode because I find the characters leaving my life again very upsetting - this is true every time - and I must have watched the series about ten times since the 1980s!

"Look Not Upon The Blondes When They Are Platinum..."

I have scouted around the web, and found a 2003 interview with Alan Plater, in which he reveals that he was keeping up-to-date with our old friends in the moonstruck outer limits of Leeds at that time:

For the record, I know exactly what's going on in Beiderbecke-land. Jill is the recently appointed head of San Quentin High, which has just finished bottom of every league table in the land. Trevor has retired and spends his days playing dominoes in the bowls pavilion with Big Al and Little Norm. Hobson has made a sideways career move out of the police force and is now a highly paid consultant in some byway of the New Labour Project. The heart of the matter is subversion. If the Scorsese gospel says we all have the capacity for violence, the Beiderbecke equivalent says we all have the capacity for deadpan daftness when confronted by men wearing suits.

Read the full interview here.

I too was sorry to read of Alan Plater's death - and, of course, we are now cut off from Beiderbecke land forever.

In the 2003 Guardian article, Alan Plater, pondering on the hold the series continued to have on its audience eighteen years after the original Beiderbecke Affair series began in 1985, wrote:

The last words belong to Jill, Trevor and great-uncle Bix.

In the Tapes, Jill says:

"Beiderbecke? The first great white jazz musician. Drank himself to death. His playing sounded like bullets shot from a bell."

"How do you know that?" says Trevor.

"You gave me a two-hour lecture about it in bed one night. In lieu of the cigarette."

"I didn't know you listened when I talked."

Maybe that's the answer. I didn't realise people were listening when I wrote.

We were, Mr Plater, oh we were!

Read our original tribute to the Beiderbecke Trilogy here.

Graduate policeman Detective Sergeant Hobson: "It is my view that the major challenge to the police force in the 1980s lies not with so-called major crime, but in the behaviour of people who, while outwardly respectable, show signs of social abnormality."

The Beiderbecke Affair, The Beiderbecke Tapes, The Beiderbecke Connection, The Beiderbecke Trilogy

The Alan Plater telly series Get Lost!, starring Bridget Turner and Alun Armstrong, began on June 12th 1981. In the first episode, Judy Threadgold was (like Mrs Dale of diary fame) worried about her husband, Jim. Jim Threadgold had disappeared, leaving behind a farewell message on video.

Judy joined forces with fellow teacher Neville Keaton in an attempt to track Jim down, and so began a wonderfully quirky four part series - a joy to watch.

I never missed an episode and, aged fifteen, was puzzled over the show's appeal for me. It seemed slow-moving plot wise. It wasn't the Sweeney. It wasn't even good old Coronation Street. There were no Regans and Carters "nicking" villains and making hard boiled buddy comments to each other, no Elsie Tanners using pub ashtrays concealed in handbags to clobber snide Ray Langtons. Going by my previous plot-driven TV form, Get Lost! didn't contain a great deal to command my attention.

So, why did it?

It took me ages to work out that the clever dialogue and ideas contained within the series were what was making it compulsive viewing for me.

I wasn't used to clever dialogue and ideas. In fact, "ideas" were frowned upon round my way. Anybody who "had ideas" was not to be trusted. Getting by day-to-day was usually the priority.

Get Lost! was good, but something absolutely wonderful lay just a few years ahead...

Above and below: programme details from the original "Beiderbecke Affair" press pack...

... issued by Yorkshire Television in January 1985.

From the press pack - "We are on the brink of a new era, if only..."

Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, London - the writer, members of the cast and production team gather for the launch of "The Beiderbecke Affair".

Back row (left to right) actors Dudley Sutton, Dominic Jephcott, Terence Rigby and Danny Schiller.

Front row (left to right) writer Alan Plater, director David Reynolds, actress Barbara Flynn and producer Anne W Gibbons.

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"Look not upon the blondes when they are platinum..."

The first episode of The Beiderbecke Affair, a six part series, was shown on 6 January 1985. The show was similar to Get Lost! - it too was written by Alan Plater and also had two school teachers as its main characters, one of them being a jazz fan. But there were differences. The dialogue was wittier, tighter, cleverer, and the casting, whether by genius or lucky accident, was absolutely wonderful. Not that the Get Lost! cast had been bad, but this really was something else.

Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam), one of the two central characters, had well and truly "heard the music" of the jazz greats. He made frequent trips to headphone heaven.

Trevor hailed from the North East of England but had somehow ended up in Yorkshire, where he taught woodwork at a rundown-and-clobbered-by-the-cutbacks comprehensive school in the "moonstruck outer limits of Leeds".

Trevor's partner was one Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn), an English teacher.

Jill had stickers with slogans like Nuclear Power - No Thanks, stuck to her front windows.

Unlike her ex-husband, who (like so many) had protested when it was fashionable to protest and become a whizz kid when it was fashionable to become a whizz kid, Jill was a genuine idealist - out to save the planet, the whale, and anything else that needed saving. Her "let's go get 'em" attitude perfectly complemented Trevor's laidback approach and together they took us through three brilliantly idiosyncratic series - The Beiderbecke Affair, The Beiderbecke Tapes and The Beiderbecke Connection. The final series was in 1988.

Bix Beiderbecke, whose playing sounded like "bullets shot from a bell", was one of Trevor's jazz heroes, and his enthusiasm for this great man sparked off three adventures.

During them, we met other highly distinctive characters - including Big Al and Little Norm, who ran an illicit "White Economy" mail order business from a church crypt and an allotment shed; Sylvia, the oldest suffragette in town; and Detective Sergeant Hobson, who had a computer, a corrupt superior and a forward facing haircut.

And then there was the dog, Jason.

The whole thing added up to simply magical telly.

Trevor and Jill with Big Al.

The platinum blonde supplied Mr Carter with an exploding hedge trimmer...

Graduate policeman Detective Sergeant Hobson: "It is my view that the major challenge to the police force in the 1980s lies not with so-called major crime, but in the behaviour of people who, while outwardly respectable, show signs of social abnormality."

From the "TV Times", 1987.