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things as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; a whole different sort of drama was evolving – and of course the advent of commercial television created a greater demand for writers. I was extremely lucky to surface at that time.’
The success of that first television
play led Harris to give up his job
and devote his time fully to writing, turning his hand to both one-off plays and episodes for long-running series. Exactly how many scripts he has written is hard to ascertain considering the time-span involved, but it must number in the hundreds, from single plays for shows such as Play for Today to a variety of series and serials such
as The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Hazell, The Saint, The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre, Adam Adamant Lives!, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
A Touch of Frost, The Darling Buds of May, Outside Edge and The Last Detective. He was also involved with, arguably, two of the finest British crime drama series: The Sweeney and Shoestring.
Not content with carving out a successful niche for himself in television scriptwriting, Harris has also enjoyed huge success writing for the theatre. His longest-running play, The Business of Murder, ran in London for eight years, while other triumphs have included Dead Guilty, The Maintenance Man, Outside Edge, which spawned an award-winning television series; three farces, most famously Two and Two Make Sex; and, of course, Stepping Out. Recent work includes The Last Laugh, which was adapted from an award- winning Japanese play and starred Martin Freeman and Roger Lloyd Pack;
his version of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which
ran at the Comedy Theatre and starred Francesca Annis and Anthony Andrews; and Going Straight, which starred Pauline Collins and John Alderton and enjoyed a successful national tour. In 2008, his play Surviving Spike, based on the book about Spike Milligan by Norma Farnes, had a successful run
at the Edinburgh Festival, while
Visiting Hour was performed at
the National Theatre, with Michael Gambon directing.
Harris has written several musicals, including Baby Love and the musical version of Stepping Out, for which he provided the book alongside Denis King’s music and lyrics by Mary Stewart-David. His latest musical offering, That Old Feeling, also featuring music by Denis King, premiered at the Mill at Sonning in October 2009. Away from stage and screen, his radio play Was it Something I Said? won the Giles Cooper Radio Award.
By any measure, Richard Harris’s output as a writer has been phenomenal. His career since that first speculatively written script in 1959 has now spanned five decades (December 2009 marked 50 years since he wrote that first play
– a golden anniversary) and, unlike most, he has continued to write new plays and scripts with extraordinary consistency, enthusiasm and success throughout that period and up to the present day, easily making him one of Britain’s most successful and prolific writers for stage and screen.
Nick Hobbes © John Good
‘BY ANY MEASURE, RICHARD HARRIS’S OUT
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