Dennis Spooner

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Dennis Spooner
Born	December 12, 1932 Tottenham, London, England, United Kingdom
Died	20 September 1986
Occupation	Television screenwriter and script editor
Children	Jeremy Daniel Elaine

Dennis Spooner (born 1 December 1932 in Tottenham London; died 20 September 1986) was an English television scriptwriter and story editor, known primarily for his programmes about fictional spies and his work in 1960s children's television. He had long-lasting professional relationships with a number of other British screenwriters and producers—most notably Brian Clemens, Terry Nation, Monty Berman, and Richard Harris—with whom he shaped several programmes. Though a contributor to BBC programmes, his work also made him one of the most prolific writers of televised output from ITC Entertainment.

Spooner died on September 20, 1986, after suffering a heart attack.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Children's TV 2.1 Gerry Anderson programmes 2.2 Doctor Who 3 The ITC years 4 Post-ITC 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Early life

Following a brief spell as a professional footballer with Leyton Orient,^[1] he served his national service stint in the Royal Air Force, where he met and formed an amateur writing partnership with Tony Williamson, Spooner returned to a few years of office work during the 1950s. There, he met and married his wife Pauline. Knowing he did not desire a career in business, he initially tried to break into the entertainment industry through performance by forming a double comedy act with Benny Davis, now a journalist living in Spain. They worked the London circuit but finding only moderate success, he repurposed himself as a writer, and began to sell half-hour comedy scripts to major BBC TV comedy star Harry Worth. This eventually led to writing several scripts for Coronation Street in 1960. He also contributed to the ITV police procedural series No Hiding Place and Ghost Squad as well as to top-rating comedy series Bootsie and Snudge and to ITV's attempt to revive Tony Hancock's career in Hancock (1963).^[2] Around this time he met Brian Clemens, and they struck up a partnership that would last the duration of his career.^[1] Clemens offered the young writer work on The Avengers, which was just beginning its nine-year stint on ITV. Clemens bought two more of his scripts in that first year, making Spooner a fairly important writer during the Ian Hendry era of the programme. After this, Spooner would enter a period in which he mostly worked for kids.

[edit] Children's TV

While his work in the spy fiction genre was undoubtedly the dominant feature of his career, Spooner also made several key contributions to children's drama. Most active in the genre from 1964 to 1966, he was a key player in both the Gerry Anderson and Doctor Who universes. Ultimately, it was to this genre that he returned at the end of his life. His final sale was the episode "Flashback" for the kids' supernatural anthology, Dramarama.

[edit] Gerry Anderson programmes

After Spooner befriended Sylvia and Gerry Anderson in the early 1960s, they offered him a chance to write for their new programme, Supercar. Though these didn't get used^[3], he successfully submitted scripts to the Anderson's next programme, Fireball XL5 in 1962. After two episodes there, he received more substantial work on Stingray, and Thunderbirds, writing almost 20 episodes for the two shows. Though Thunderbirds was the final major work he did for the Andersons, he would return in the 1970s to write single episodes of the more adult-oriented UFO and The Protectors. His final work for the Andersons was to write some additional scenes required to knit the first and seventeenth episodes of Space 1999 into a movie release, known as Alien Attack.^[4] Importantly, the work on the early Anderson programmes were also Spooner's first regular period of work for ITC Entertainment.

[edit] Doctor Who

Spooner worked on Doctor Who almost exclusively in the formative William Hartnell era. Perhaps most significantly, he was the script editor from The Rescue to The Chase. By the time Spooner left, the only remaining original character was the Doctor himself. One of his major goals during this period was thus to prove the programme could survive major cast changes. This was partly achieved through the gradual introduction of humour into the programme, evident most strongly in the scripts he personally penned. The BBC's episode guide notes that " ... it is for its innovative use of humour that The Romans will always be best remembered, and in this respect it represents a worthwhile attempt at finding new dramatic ground for the series to cover".^[5] It was a change that resounded with the public, helping an episode of The Romans garner the highest-ever share in the history of the series.^[6]

Spooner, though, is responsible for helping to foster a new paradigm for the historical type of adventure. It was he that fully developed the notion of the pseudo-historical with his story The Time Meddler. A gag in the previous story, The Chase, had been that Daleks were responsible for the disappearance of the Marie Celeste. In Meddler, however, the central plot was that actual historical events were acting as a backdrop for a battle between the Doctor and an alien opponent. In sustaining the notion for a full serial, Spooner gave birth to an approach to historicals that has continued through to the most recent series of the programme. Furthermore, Meddler was also the first time another member of the Doctor's race — not yet identified as the Time Lords — would be shown other than his granddaughter, Susan.

Although he is most known for The Reign of Terror and these other two historicals, he also had some significant experience writing Dalek episodes. At outgoing producer Verity Lambert's behest, he wrote half of the longest Doctor Who serial in history, The Daleks' Master Plan, with Terry Nation.^[7] Significantly, his final assignment on the programme was to solve problems with the characterization of new Doctor, Patrick Troughton, on the story, The Power of the Daleks.^[8]

This was a one-off flirtation with the Second Doctor, though, as Spooner had already been pressed into service on another programme that Terry Nation was script editing. Enticed by the prospect of working on a programme which would receive attention in the lucrative American market, Spooner left Doctor Who most immediately to help Nation write the overwhelming majority of the scripts for The Baron in 1966.

[edit] The ITC years

The move to The Baron was the start of Spooner's second, and most creative, period with ITC. Starting in 1967 Spooner became a sort of "contracted freelancer" with ITC. He was obliged to write 10 episodes annually for ITC,^[9] although he wasn't exclusively bound to them. After The Baron fizzled on ABC in America, the show ended its run in Britain. Spooner then turned to old friend, Richard Harris, to help him create a new venture, Man in a Suitcase. The more significant partnership of 1967, however, was with ITC producer Monty Berman. Soon after meeting, Spooner and Berman launched a production company called Scoton Productions. From 1967 to 1971, Berman and Spooner would create The Champions, Department S, its spin-off Jason King, and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Though none of these programmes lasted more than two seasons, they all survived in the public memory long enough to justify video and DVD release decades later. Indeed, Hopkirk was re-imagined by television producers in 2000 for a two-series run. Spooner's time with these programmes betrayed not just an overwhelming interest in spy fiction, but also a penchant for rewarding friendship. Many former writing partners like Tony Williamson and Richard Harris returned to work on Spooner's ITC creations.

Despite his heavy involvement with ITC, he availed himself of the non-exclusivity of the arrangement. From the late 1960s through to the early 1970s, he continued to submit scripts to the BBC and ITV. This allowed him to be one of the most prolific writers on The Avengers during the Tara King era, and to successfully submit scripts to Paul Temple and Doomwatch.

[edit] Post-ITC

After Spooner's contract with ITC lapsed, he mostly entered into a period of genuine freelance work that would occupy the remainder of his career. Now a jobbing writer, his scripts were accepted on shows like Bergerac and The Professionals. Nevertheless, as had been his motivation for joining The Baron—and, really, that of ITC boss Lew Grade ^[10]—Spooner still longed for some success in America. Towards this end, he re-joined Brian Clemens. In 1973, Clemens had begun Thriller, an ATV/ITV anthological mystery show that was shown in the US under the title ABC Mystery Theatre. Though Spooner only wrote two episodes of the show, he is one of only two writers other than Clemens himself to have done so. When Clemens made his next assault on American television, The New Avengers, Spooner would take a much larger role. On the show, he and Clemens wrote the overwhelming majority of the scripts. So great was his contribution to New Avengers that, if considered alongside his work for the parent programme, it makes him the third-most prolific writer for The Avengers, and second only to Clemens for the length of his association with the programme. While this gave Spooner the greatest continuous work of his latter career, neither it nor Thriller led to a long-term presence in America. He continued to try to break into the American market, but in the end sold only one idea to a prime time American network show: a story he had concoted with Clemens was used in the third season of Remington Steele. Thus, when he died suddenly in 1986, the legacy he left behind was overwhelmingly British.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Dennis Spooner at the Internet Movie Database
• Dennis Spooner at The Playwrights Database