Brian Clark, writer of Whose Life is it Anyway?, a stage hit on both sides of the Atlantic and a successful Hollywood film – obituary

Brian Clark, who has died aged 89, was the writer of some of television’s most unlikely but exquisite successes. His writing career began when he was 40, with an overnight success, Whose Life is it Anyway? (1972), a modest television play which became an international stage success and ultimately a Hollywood movie.

But Clark was first and foremost a television writer, and by the end of the 1970s was in the premier league. His cherished 10-part serial Telford’s Change captured phenomenal audiences, by which time Clark and his collaborators, the director Barry Davis, producer Mark Shivas and actor Peter Barkworth, had formed one of British television’s first independent production companies.

Telford’s Change was Clark’s definitive work. Though he was initially uninspired by Barkworth’s idea of a series about a bank manager, the everyday stories of small-town folk in need of help or investment proved to be a bountiful source of immediate human drama.

Mark Telford was a high-flying merchant banker who decided to return to his roots running a local branch, much to the exasperation of his wife (Hannah Gordon). Clark made the prosaic crises of garnishee orders and unauthorised overdrafts inexplicably gripping, while Telford’s fragile domestic life – with his wife embarking on her own career and contemplating an affair – was interweaved immaculately, showcasing his distinctive knack of making the banal compelling, his embattled characters always quietly heroic and optimistic, his scripts paced with a gentle urgency.

Yet despite the elegance of his work, he wrote completely without structure. When Hannah Gordon asked him during rehearsals for the eighth episode how the series would end, Clark confessed that he had no idea yet, explaining that he always wrote “to find out what happens. If I knew at the beginning, I’d never write it.”

Brian Robert Clark was born in Bournemouth on June 3 1932. The son of a blacksmith, he was brought up in Bristol, where he attended Merrywood Grammar School. After National Service with the Royal Signals he trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama, but he decided that his ambition was to write, and so studied for a degree in English Literature at Nottingham University and taught drama at Hull University. He co-wrote a script for Radio 4, Why Did You Let Him Go? (1971), and gave up his job to write a play – only to spend “three months staring at a blank page”.

Then one night an idea struck him as he drove to the Stables Theatre in Manchester to see a new play by Trevor Griffiths. Meeting the author in the bar, he realised that the pair had corresponded through Griffiths’s day job as a BBC education officer, and Clark was then introduced to Margaret Matheson, a script editor at the BBC who had come to see the show.

Clark mentioned his idea and, fired by her interest, quickly wrote Whose Life is it Anyway? It was rejected as a Play for Today but was fished out of the slush pile at Granada, trimmed, and recorded for television with Ian McShane in the lead role of a sculptor paralysed after a car crash and battling for the right to end his life.

The play was a remarkable success, a stage production starring Tom Conti winning an Olivier Award and, after transferring to Broadway, a Tony. Clark ended 1972 with The Debden Nativity, a group improvisation starring local amateurs which showcased his skills as a teacher and as a crafter of the spontaneous. The process was captured for a Christmas edition of the ITV arts magazine Aquarius.

As well as occasional work on established series such Crown Court (1972) and the opening episode of All Creatures Great and Small (1978), Clark excelled in the realm of the single play. He drew upon his educational experience for Campion’s Interview, originally staged at the Soho Poly in 1976 and adapted for the BBC the following year, in which a saintly headmaster uses the opportunity of an interview for a new position to explain to the local authority, with inescapable precision, the devastating effects of their policies on the children he teaches.

The Saturday Party, a 1975 Play for Today in which a stockbroker loses his job, and with it his social stature, was the beginning of his partnership with Barkworth, Shivas and Davis, a magnificently conducted piece which blended the propulsion of a thriller with the light touch of a comedy of manners.

A sequel two years later, The Country Party, was even more impressive, gracefully observing the decline of the comfortable middle classes through the events of one evening in a chatty rural restaurant.

After the success of Telford’s Change, the company which the four had formed, Astramead, produced a stage play, Can You Hear Me at the Back? (Piccadilly Theatre, 1979), then returned to television with the heart-breaking Late Starter (1985), in which Barkworth’s innocent professor of English discovers on the day of his retirement that his wife has gambled away his life savings and vanished, leaving him to start again, living in a bedsit and working behind a bar.

Clark was a lifelong member of the Labour Party, proud of having delivered leaflets for the 1945 general election. After two decades of intensive work for television, his writing career faded out quietly, and he taught screenwriting at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design Film School while running a theatrical publishers, the Amber Lane Press.

Brian Clark’s first three marriages ended in divorce, and a son from his second marriage, the playwright and lyricist Stephen Clark, predeceased him. He is survived by his fourth wife, the film writer and psychotherapist Cherry Potter.

Brian Clark, born June 3 1932, died November 16 2021