"I don't know how much I ought to bang on about this," says Alan Dossor, relaxing between slurps of wine.

Clearly, he is on his hobbyhorse.

"I'll bang on about it for a bit," he decides, and proceeds to take an ample bite from the hand that has, for some years, fed him.

"The trouble with the BBC..." He draws on his cigarette. "... is that the entire place is now full of suits and accountants whose jobs appear to be to make it more and more difficult to do anything original."

Dossor is not a suit. Doubtless, he owns one and doubtless it is no less crumpled than the casual shirt and loose jacket he now sports. This, he points out, is the working attire of creative, theatrical types.

The amiable and softly-spoken Yorkshireman is one of Britain's leading directors of television drama. His repertoire includes A Touch of Frost, The Governor and as many others as there are coppers in Sun Hill.

"It's pathetic," he continues, warming to this theme. "Until five years ago, the BBC was the main area of work if you were interested in doing serious drama on film. Now, it's in a state of disarray, to put it politely. If you submit a project, all they want to know is, Which successful show are we copying here? Is it Heartbeat? They're absolutely clueless if it's an original idea."

It is his disinfatuation with television (a creative desert in which, he says, Yorkshire TV's drama department is one of the few oases) which has led him, for the first time in several years, to the live stage.

In the early and mid-Seventies, Dossor was at the cutting edge of new wave theatre, running the Everyman in Liverpool and commissioning young, local writers like Willy Russell.

Today, it is to the similarly innovative West Yorkshire Playhouse he has turned - but to a playwright whose work he had until recently scorned.

"To be honest," he says, as if he was capable of being anything but, "I think I would have turned my nose up at Alan Ayckbourn when I was younger. To me, he was a commercial, boulevard playwright.

"But as you get older, your perspective changes, and now I have enormous admiration for the guy.

"He has the ability to make an audience cringe even while they're laughing, because they recognise in his characters certain aspects of themselves that they don't always like to admit to. He's very clever."

Dossor has been at the helm of a three-month season of Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges cycle of comedies, which follow the same handful of characters - all played by two actors - through a series of "parallel lives", dictated by the same initial events. If nothing else, says Dossor, "it takes the ..... out of acting".

"Never mind the method acting thing of standing in the wings and preparing yourself for 15 minutes - here, you play a breakdown and seconds later you hurl on another costume and hit the stage again."

Dossor's theatrical reawakening continues next month when he directs a major revival of Alan Bennett's 1982 Yorkshire comedy, Enjoy.

A failure on its West End debut, it is a homily to the disappearing world of northern back-to-backs and the self-reliant communities they produced.

Much is expected of it, since Bennett based it on the experiences of his parents and set it on the streets that are now the Playhouse's back yard.

"It's an extraordinarily prophetic play," says Dossor. "Bennett was a good decade ahead of his time - but by the end of the Eighties it was clear what he meant about a museum culture, about the heresy of the whole of English life being siphoned off into heritage parks. Leeds now is full of them: museums where you can see what life used to be like.

"On the surface it's a very funny play. Underneath, it's very black indeed. Audiences can respond to it on the level they choose, and I'll be fascinated to see whether they choose to make it a funny evening or a rather harrowing one.

"I think people will come in huge numbers. After all, it's about their city - their history."

l One Man Protest, the third chapter of Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges, runs to May 15. Enjoy, by Alan Bennett, will feature the former Coronation Street actress Thelma Barlow, and will run from May 28 to June 26. Tickets for both productions are bookable on 0113 213 7700.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.