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Richard Harris (television writer)
Encyclopedia
Richard Harris is a prolific British television
writer, most active from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. He writes primarily for the crime
and detecitve
genres, having contributed episodes of series like The Avengers
, The Saint
, The Sweeney
, Armchair Mystery Theatre, and Target. He has helped to create several standout programmes of the genre, including Adam Adamant Lives!
, Man in a Suitcase
, and Shoestring. Despite a career which has been largely spent writing for the crime and detective genre, in 1994 he won the prize for best situation comedy
from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain
for Outside Edge
, a programme he had originated as a stage play. Indeed, though the majority of his work has been for television, a substantial amount of his output has been for the stage
.
's 1960 ITV
series, Police Surgeon, for which he wrote the final episode, "The Bigger They Are". Though he wrote for the initial runs of The Avengers and The Saint, much of the early 1960s was dominated by his contributions to anthological mystery programmes like The Edgar Wallace
Mystery Theatre and situation comedies like Hancock
. His attempts at comedies in the early 1960s were largely collaborative efforts with Dennis Spooner
. These joint efforts did not establish either writer in the comedy genre, Instead, as their two failed pilots for Comedy Playhouse
proved, the duo were really more interested in writing dramatic works. Despite his commercial failures with Spooner, he continued to collaborate with others during his early career—perhaps most successfully in 1966's Adam Adamant Returns!, whose pilot he wrote with Donald Cotton
. By the end of the decade, he had contributed individual episodes to no less than twenty series.
From the late 1960s onward, producers began allowing him to write a number of "first episodes", effectively making him co-creator of a number of projects like The Gamblers and Life and Death of Penelope. Despite having turned a number of ideas into initial scripts, however, he only occasionally received on-screen credit as co-creator. This pattern is evident in two of his most recent shows, both adapted from literature. On The Last Detective
, he is recognized as having "devised the series for television". On A Touch of Frost
, he is not—despite having written the entirety of the programme's first season.
Beginning in about 1971. Harris turned his earlier comedic ambitions towards the stage. The vast majority of his comedic work, even if it later ended up film, derives from his career as a playwright. Throughout the 1970s, a new play of his would be produced almost annually. Though the frequency of his stage work slowed in later decades, his plays continued to debut into the early part of the 21st century.
While the vast majority of his career has been spent as a freelancer, he has been an occasional script editor
, with shows like Hazell
and Hunter's Walk.
He is an intermittent radio drama
tist, and has won the Giles Cooper Award for adapting his teleplay
, Is It Something I Said? One of his plays, Stepping Out
,
has appeared in three different versions, ultimately allowing him the opportunity of a musical film
adaptation
.
A substantial part of Harris's body of work is adaptation. Often, as in examples cited above, this has taken the form of adapting his own work from one medium into another. However, he has also taken a number of literary characters and adapted them into ongoing series. The most long-running of these adaptations are A Touch of Frost and The Last Detective, but he has also converted works including Mark Twain
's The Prince and the Pauper
into limited-run serials
. A third and more minor kind of adaptation has been the conversion of non-English
sources into English drama. His play, The Last Laugh, derives from a Japan
ese work, and his adaptation of a Norwegian
source into the dual-language film, Orions belte, won the inaugural Amanda for Best Norwegian Film in 1985.
Because Harris is a contemporary of the late Richard St. John Harris
, his writing credits are sometimes erroneously ascribed to the Irish
actor
.
British television
Public television broadcasting started in the United Kingdom in 1936, and now has a collection of free and subscription services over a variety of distribution media, through which there are over 480 channelsTaking the base Sky EPG TV Channels. A breakdown is impossible due to a) the number of...
writer, most active from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. He writes primarily for the crime
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
and detecitve
Detective fiction
Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
genres, having contributed episodes of series like The Avengers
The Avengers (TV series)
The Avengers is a spy-fi British television series set in the 1960s Britain. The Avengers initially focused on Dr. David Keel and his assistant John Steed . Hendry left after the first series and Steed became the main character, partnered with a succession of assistants...
, The Saint
The Saint (TV series)
The Saint was an ITC mystery spy thriller television series that aired in the UK on ITV between 1962 and 1969. It centred on the Leslie Charteris literary character, Simon Templar, a Robin Hood-like adventurer with a penchant for disguise. The character may be nicknamed The Saint because the...
, The Sweeney
The Sweeney
The Sweeney is a 1970s British television police drama focusing on two members of the Flying Squad, a branch of the Metropolitan Police specialising in tackling armed robbery and violent crime in London...
, Armchair Mystery Theatre, and Target. He has helped to create several standout programmes of the genre, including Adam Adamant Lives!
Adam Adamant Lives!
Adam Adamant Lives! is a British television series which ran from 1966 to 1967 on the BBC. Proposing that an adventurer born in 1867 had been revived from hibernation in 1966, the show was a comedy adventure that took a satirical look at life in the 1960s through the eyes of an Edwardian .- Character...
, Man in a Suitcase
Man in a Suitcase
Man in a Suitcase is a 1967 television series produced by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.-Origins and overview:Man in a Suitcase was effectively a replacement for Danger Man, whose production had been curtailed when its star Patrick McGoohan had decided to create his own series, The Prisoner...
, and Shoestring. Despite a career which has been largely spent writing for the crime and detective genre, in 1994 he won the prize for best situation comedy
Situation comedy
A situation comedy, often shortened to sitcom, is a genre of comedy that features characters sharing the same common environment, such as a home or workplace, accompanied with jokes as part of the dialogue...
from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain
Writers' Guild of Great Britain
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain, established in 1959, is a trade union for professional writers. It is affiliated with both the Trades Union Congress and the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds .-Activities:...
for Outside Edge
Outside Edge
Outside Edge is a play by Richard Harris about a cricket team trying to win a game of cricket whilst sorting out their various marital problems.-Plot:...
, a programme he had originated as a stage play. Indeed, though the majority of his work has been for television, a substantial amount of his output has been for the stage
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
.
Career
Harris began writing freelance episodes for British television in his mid-twenties. His first sale was to Sydney NewmanSydney Newman
Sydney Cecil Newman, OC was a Canadian film and television producer, who played a pioneering role in British television drama from the late 1950s to the late 1960s...
's 1960 ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
series, Police Surgeon, for which he wrote the final episode, "The Bigger They Are". Though he wrote for the initial runs of The Avengers and The Saint, much of the early 1960s was dominated by his contributions to anthological mystery programmes like The Edgar Wallace
Edgar Wallace
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was an English crime writer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and numerous articles in newspapers and journals....
Mystery Theatre and situation comedies like Hancock
Hancock's Half Hour
Hancock's Half Hour was a BBC radio comedy, and later television comedy, series of the 1950s and 60s written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The series starred Tony Hancock, with Sid James; the radio version also co-starred, at various times, Moira Lister, Andrée Melly, Hattie Jacques, Bill Kerr...
. His attempts at comedies in the early 1960s were largely collaborative efforts with Dennis Spooner
Dennis Spooner
Dennis Spooner was an English television screenwriter and story editor, known primarily for his programmes about fictional spies and his work in children's television in the 1960s...
. These joint efforts did not establish either writer in the comedy genre, Instead, as their two failed pilots for Comedy Playhouse
Comedy Playhouse
Comedy Playhouse was a long-running British anthology series of one-off unrelated sitcoms that aired for 120 episodes from 1961 to 1975. Many episodes later graduated to their own series, including Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, All Gas and Gaiters, The Liver Birds, Are You Being Served?...
proved, the duo were really more interested in writing dramatic works. Despite his commercial failures with Spooner, he continued to collaborate with others during his early career—perhaps most successfully in 1966's Adam Adamant Returns!, whose pilot he wrote with Donald Cotton
Donald Cotton
Donald Cotton was a writer for radio and television during the black and white era. He also wrote numerous musical revues for the stage...
. By the end of the decade, he had contributed individual episodes to no less than twenty series.
From the late 1960s onward, producers began allowing him to write a number of "first episodes", effectively making him co-creator of a number of projects like The Gamblers and Life and Death of Penelope. Despite having turned a number of ideas into initial scripts, however, he only occasionally received on-screen credit as co-creator. This pattern is evident in two of his most recent shows, both adapted from literature. On The Last Detective
The Last Detective
The Last Detective is an ITV drama starring Peter Davison as Dangerous Davies. The first series aired in 2003 with three more seasons succeeding this...
, he is recognized as having "devised the series for television". On A Touch of Frost
A Touch of Frost (TV series)
A Touch of Frost is a television detective series produced by Yorkshire Television for ITV from 1992 until 2010, initially based on the Frost novels by R. D. Wingfield....
, he is not—despite having written the entirety of the programme's first season.
Beginning in about 1971. Harris turned his earlier comedic ambitions towards the stage. The vast majority of his comedic work, even if it later ended up film, derives from his career as a playwright. Throughout the 1970s, a new play of his would be produced almost annually. Though the frequency of his stage work slowed in later decades, his plays continued to debut into the early part of the 21st century.
While the vast majority of his career has been spent as a freelancer, he has been an occasional script editor
Script editor
A script editor is a member of the production team of scripted television programmes, usually dramas and comedies. The script editor has many responsibilities including finding new script writers, developing storyline and series ideas with writers, ensuring that scripts are suitable for production...
, with shows like Hazell
Hazell (TV series)
Hazell is a British television series that ran from 1978–1979, about a fictional private detective named James Hazell.-Overview:James Hazell was a cockney private detective character created by journalist and novelist Gordon Williams and footballer-turned-manager Terry Venables...
and Hunter's Walk.
He is an intermittent radio drama
Radio drama
Radio drama is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance, broadcast on radio or published on audio media, such as tape or CD. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story...
tist, and has won the Giles Cooper Award for adapting his teleplay
Teleplay
A teleplay is a television play, a comedy or drama written or adapted for television. The term surfaced during the 1950s with wide usage to distinguish a television plays from stage plays for the theater and screenplays written for films...
, Is It Something I Said? One of his plays, Stepping Out
Stepping Out (1991 film)
Stepping Out is a 1991 musical-comedy film directed by Lewis Gilbert, starring Liza Minnelli, written by Richard Harris and based on a play also written by Harris. Minnelli plays the role of a has-been Broadway performer who gives tap lesson to a group of misfits who, through their dance classes,...
,
has appeared in three different versions, ultimately allowing him the opportunity of a musical film
Musical film
The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate...
adaptation
Film adaptation
Film adaptation is the transfer of a written work to a feature film. It is a type of derivative work.A common form of film adaptation is the use of a novel as the basis of a feature film, but film adaptation includes the use of non-fiction , autobiography, comic book, scripture, plays, and even...
.
A substantial part of Harris's body of work is adaptation. Often, as in examples cited above, this has taken the form of adapting his own work from one medium into another. However, he has also taken a number of literary characters and adapted them into ongoing series. The most long-running of these adaptations are A Touch of Frost and The Last Detective, but he has also converted works including Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
's The Prince and the Pauper
The Prince and the Pauper
The Prince and the Pauper is an English-language novel by American author Mark Twain. It was first published in 1881 in Canada before its 1882 publication in the United States. The book represents Twain's first attempt at historical fiction...
into limited-run serials
Serial (radio and television)
Serials are series of television programs and radio programs that rely on a continuing plot that unfolds in a sequential episode by episode fashion. Serials typically follow main story arcs that span entire television seasons or even the full run of the series, which distinguishes them from...
. A third and more minor kind of adaptation has been the conversion of non-English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
sources into English drama. His play, The Last Laugh, derives from a Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese work, and his adaptation of a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
source into the dual-language film, Orions belte, won the inaugural Amanda for Best Norwegian Film in 1985.
Because Harris is a contemporary of the late Richard St. John Harris
Richard Harris
Richard St John Harris was an Irish actor, singer-songwriter, theatrical producer, film director and writer....
, his writing credits are sometimes erroneously ascribed to the Irish
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
.