Clive Exton

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Clive Exton (born April 11, 1930 in London) is an English television and film scriptwriter and sometime playwright. Formerly an actor, his first television play (No Fixed Abode) was transmitted by Granada Television in 1959. He then joined Sydney Newman’s Armchair Theatre which produced Where I Live, Hold My Hand, Soldier, I’ll Have You to Remember, The Trial of Doctor Fancy and others, the best of them being directed by Ted Kotcheff.

He later wrote The Close Prisoner (also Kotcheff) for ATV's Studio 64 - a season of plays designed to emphasize the role of the writer in television - and Land of My Dreams, The Bone Yard, The Big Eat, Are You Ready For the Music ? and The Rainbirds for the BBC. He also wrote The Boundary with Tom Stoppard for the BBC’s experimental series The Eleventh Hour.

Most of this early work is now lost, having been made in black and white and at a time when the telerecording was the primary means of recording television or when programmes were routinely wiped.

Exton then moved away from the single play and initiated series such as Killers, Conceptions of Murder and The Crezz, a depiction of Notting Hill life in the seventies. He also contributed, under the nom de plume M. K. Jeeves, two episodes to the first season of Terry Nation's Survivors for the BBC, most notably episode nine 'Law and Order', which is considered by many fans to be a series highlight.

Ten unsatisfactory years in the film industry followed - seven of them in Hollywood. Exton has said that the only feature film he ever wrote that pleased him was 10 Rillington Place (1971). Other films include Night Must Fall, Entertaining Mr Sloane and Isadora (with Melvyn Bragg). He worked on many films uncredited, but it is now generally known that he made a major contribution to the scripts of Georgy Girl and The Bounty.

Returning to England in 1986, Exton found the television business radically changed by the rise of the independent producer. With one of these - Brian Eastman - he wrote most of the episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989-2000), all of Jeeves and Wooster (1990-1993) and many of Rosemary & Thyme (2003-).

He has also dramatised for television works by Jean Cocteau, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon and H. G. Wells.

Exton has written only sporadically for the theatre - Have You Any Dirty Washing, Mother Dear ? (1970), Twixt (1990), Dressing Down (1995), Barking in Essex (2005).