BOLTON'S Octagon Theatre is celebrating its 40th anniversary season and, to mark the occasion, The Bolton News is publishing a series of articles written by the people who helped make it one of the North-west's most successful theatres. Today, it is the turn of playwright Alan Plater. . . .

IGNORE the revisionists who tell you all society's ills started in the 1960s. They are wrong.

It was a cracking decade, idealism flourished, people argued about principles and you could spot the difference between the political parties.

There were one-off television plays on all three channels every week and a genuine renaissance in British theatre.

By comparison, the 1950s had been catastrophic. In 1953, Coronation year, more than 200 theatres closed. Millions of people bought television sets and never went out again.

To be sure, most of the theatres were music-halls (ironically, since that has always been Her Majesty's preferred form of theatre) but it was a body-blow and it was many years before the business recovered its nerve.

But recover it did. Coventry built its Belgrade, Nottingham its Playhouse and all over the country professional play-makers started asking the question: please may we have one too? Not simply a building but a workshop where we could produce a new drama geared to the needs of the community. Joan Littlewood at Stratford East had shown us the way (and frequently the truth and the light) as had Peter Cheeseman, working in a converted cinema at Stoke-on-Trent.

We started a campaign in Hull for such a place and ended up in a converted church hall, handy for both the crematorium and the abattoir. Hull Truck, as it now is, moves into its first purpose-built theatre next year - 38 years on.

In the late 60s rumours began to circulate about a remarkable project taking shape in Bolton - a genuine, purpose-built, totally adaptable theatre to a design master-minded by an idealistic young lecturer from Loughborough College called Robin Pemberton Billing. It was to be an astonishing auditorium, capable of housing anything from Billy Smart's Circus or Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Once it was opened, like any keen-eyed fledgling playwright, I was keen to have a whack at the space. Not only that, I can be precise about the first visit. It was on April 12, 1969. Roger Chapman, the Octagon's first director of theatre-in-education was, like me, a Hull City supporter.

He telephoned me with an offer I couldn't refuse: "City are at Burnden Park on Saturday. We'll get you a seat in the director's box and we'll take you to the theatre on the night."

And so it came to pass. Bolton won 1-0, I saw Nat Lofthouse at close quarters, and I got a first glimpse of the Octagon. The play was, I think, by John Bowen, with whom I shared an agent at the time, but it was a later production, The Shaughran, a flamboyant Irish play by Dion Boucicault with a great deal of leaping about, that alerted me to the dramatic possibilities of the space.

My first production was a knockabout piece of Gritty Northern Surrealism laced with rude songs and politics, called Charlie Came to Our Town. Among those taking part were Bernard Wrigley, who's remained a valued friend and occasional workmate to this day, Ted Richards and Gorden Kaye, who later achieved popular fame in Emmerdale and Allo Allo.

A mere 36 years later I was at the Octagon again with Blonde Bombshells of 1943. And if the best-laid plans of theatre producers don't gan agley, I'll be back next year with a musical, written with my good pal, ace jazz musician Alan Barnes. It's been a long time between gigs but you've got to admit, I'm loyal.

Happy Birthday.

Alan Plater