ALAN Plater admits the fact that he'd written 39-and-a-half plays in his illustrious career had escaped him until he was told of a website which listed all of them.

The Jarrow-born playwright is putting the finishing touches to number 40 - a musical for the re-vamped Live Theatre at Newcastle - having just penned the latest adventure for Kevin Whately's Lewis on ITV1, which is about to start shooting at Oxford.

"There is stuff on websites that I wasn't aware of until last year when I was told about this zealous guy in Yorkshire who had got a more comprehensive list than I had on file. It means I've overtaken Shakespeare which is nice," he says.

Plater, 71, has been putting his work in front of millions since he wrote scripts for legendary BBC police drama Z Cars in the 1960s and was an obvious choice to launch Darlington Civic Theatre's 100th anniversary season with Blonde Bombshells of 1943, which runs from Monday until Saturday.

"I'm thrilled to bits it's the anniversary season. The great thing about Bombshells is that you get a free go at all the music of the 30s and 40s. You start with a shortlist of 250 great songs and a goldmine of music," says Alan who adapted the script from the BBC programme starring Ian Holm and Dame Judi Dench.

He's penned ten North-East set plays, the latest, called Looking For Buddy, is drawn from his early days of studying architecture at Newcastle University which features a central character of a Tyneside architect in search of a mythical jazz recording.

"It's about the lost recording of Buddy Bolden, the famous trumpeter from New Orleans, who went mad and never recorded. But jazz fans being what they are, there has always been this mythology of the lost recording. That's the springboard because I'm not too heavy on plots," he jokes.

This is his latest project with musician Alan Barnes and the pair have been dubbed The Gilbert And Sullivan of modern jazz. "That's the nicest thing anyone has said about me for a long time," he says of the musical which will be seen next year. Despite moving to London in 1984, having also spent many years in Hull, Alan regularly visits the North-East where he created the landmark Close the Coalhouse Door in 1968 about coal-mining.

He recalls the work playing to rave notices and packed houses in the North-East before it "played to rave notices and rows of empty seats" in the West End. "We were asked to take cuts or waive our royalties to keep it going and I remember Alex Glasgow (who composed the songs) calling me up and saying 'this is amazing, we write a play about the exploitation of the workers and they're trying to exploit us... and we're going to let them'."

He is anxious about the way that the North-East is viewed. "I thought I'd stop being a professional Northerner when I moved to London but I'm actually more aggressively Northern than when I lived there. I think television is now so controlled from London that regional television has almost totally collapsed as far as I can see." Alan recalls eight plays a year being produced by BBC North in the 1960s "now you're lucky to find eight plays a year right across the board on television".

"I think the primary responsibility of TV, particularly the BBC, is to tell the world what is happening in the country. It isn't, it's a self-portrait of very specific bits processed into soap operas. It's about franchises and not about the world."

His latest contribution to TV is the new series of Lewis which he has affectionately nicknamed "Z-Victor 2 in suits" and admits nosing around Oxford knowing that Inspector Morse and high death rates were factors.

"I said 'do I have to kill people?' and they said 'oh yes, they have to be murder stories'," Alan says. His storylines will be focusing on students allowing some promising young actors to be cast. "I've got children and grandchildren approaching the student stage and I thought I'd feed off them, steal from them... but don't tell them.

"I've been going on for 40 years and I had quite a sweet fan letter from a guy in Yorkshire about a radio play which said 'loved the play, on the other hand you've been at it so long if you couldn't write a decent play it would be a bad look-out."