David Turner (18 March 1927, Birmingham – 11 December 1990, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire) was a British playwright.
From a working class background,[1] he studied French at Birmingham University and subsequently worked as a school teacher in that city. He is best remembered for his stage play Semi-Detached, first performed during 1962, which reached Broadway and was made into the film All the Way Up (1970). He prepared modern versions of classic plays including John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, a version seen in London in 1968, and The Miser by Molière, which was performed at the Birmingham Rep in 1973.
An early opponent of the 'Clean-Up TV' founder Mary Whitehouse he interrupted, as an audience member, the meeting in April 1964 at Birmingham Town Hall which first brought her to national attention in Britain accusing Mrs Whitehouse of attacking creative freedoms.[2] The creator of Swizzlewick (BBC 1964), a twice weekly comedy drama, he wrote an episode of the series featuring possibly the earliest parody of the morality campaigner. Way Off Beat, another suburban comedy like Semi-Detached, was transmitted as part of The Wednesday Play anthology series in June 1966. Critic John Russell Taylor thought Turner had "revivified the Jonsonian [Ben Jonson's] comedy of humours".[3]
Turner was for a time a scriptweriter on The Archers, the BBC radio soap opera. He also adapted literary works for television. A five part version of Germinal, from the 1885 novel by Émile Zola, was transmitted early in 1970 and Roads to Freedom (also 1970) was a thirteen part adaptation of the novel of that name by Jean-Paul Sartre. Both were nominated for several BAFTA awards including one for Turner's version of Sartre's work.[4] He also wrote versions of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1968) based on her comic classic and North and South (1975) from the 1855 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.