Alan Plater

He had already written six plays for radio, submitting each and receiving nothing other than encouraging noises, then, as Plater said in an interview with the Yorkshire Post in 2005, in 1961 "the seventh crept onto radio".

A year later he received a fateful call from his agent, Peggy Ramsay. Plater said: "She said: 'Darling, would you like to write for Z Cars?' It was like receiving a phone call from the Pope asking if you wanted a personal blessing."

Born in Jarrow in 1935, Plater, who lost a long battle with pancreatic cancer on Friday, moved to Hull with his family when he was three.

While he returned regularly to the North East to visit family, Plater's accent was undeniably East Riding. He would often claim, when asked if he considered Hull or Jarrow as home, that he had "dual nationality".

Attending school with another famous son of Hull, Tom Courtenay, Plater harboured desires of becoming a writer from an early age.

His route to writing was circuitous, and after leaving school he returned to the North East, to study architecture at Newcastle University.

He never completed his course, dropping out and taking a job in an architect's office in Hull. While working at the firm Plater also tirelessly perfected his craft of writing.

In 1958, he had the first financial reward of his writing career when he was paid for an article for Punch. He also wrote book reviews for the Yorkshire Post, delighted, he said, to receive "a couple of guineas" for the pieces. Then in 1961 his seventh play was broadcast on radio and he wrote his first television play, The Referees, for BBC North.

His first episode for Z Cars, written in 1962, was an easy start for Plater; the kitchen-sink police drama was perfectly suited to his gritty Northern, writing.

From the start Plater achieved the difficult task of winning both critical and popular acclaim.

While continuing to write for television drama, through the Sixties Plater hinted at a career that would eventually bestride a great many literary art forms – he wrote novels, movie screenplays, stage plays and radio drama.

In 1969 his stage play Close the Coalhouse Door became a milestone in his career and a turning point for British drama. Born of the Angry Young Men theatre movement from the previous decade, this musical lament for the North East coal industry sealed Plater's reputation as a writer of rare quality and passion.

In the 1970s – his most prolific period – he dramatised the lives of the Pankhurst sisters in Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), retold Chaucer on a coach trip to Wembley in Trinity Tales (1975) and gave Les Dawson his meatiest role as the title character of The Loner (1975).

In the 1980s the projects grew more lavish. He adapted The Barchester Chronicles (1982) and Fortunes of War (1987). He made a minor work of political fiction into the landmark political drama A Very British Coup (1988), and spun a novel of his own into The Beiderbecke Affair (1984). The last decade gave him his biggest international success – the Golden Globe-winning The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2000).

In recent years he saw his plays produced by Northern Broadsides (Sweet William, 2005), Hull Truck Theatre (Confessions of a City Supporter, 2004) and West Yorkshire Playhouse (Blonde Bombshells of 1943, 2004).

Plater is survived by his wife, Shirley Rubenstein, two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage and three stepsons, along with many grandchildren.