Robert Banks Stewart

Died: January 14, 2016

ROBERT Banks Stewart, who has died at the age of 84, was a Scottish writer and producer who made a huge impact on British television, writing for a number of well-known series and creating a pair of seminal crime dramas.

He was born in Edinburgh as plain Robert Stewart to an identically named father, a master printer who performed in an amateur end-of-the-pier Pierrot troupe, and grew up on one of the last new housing developments built prior to the Second World War below Arthur's Seat.

He showed early promise when he wrote his first play at Moray House, an experimental primary school attached to the teacher training college and won a national Burns Essay prize. By his early teens he was contributing stories to local newspapers, leaving school at 15 to become an office boy on the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. After national service he resumed his journalistic life as a reporter, then as a sub-editor on The Scotsman before, aged just 24, returning to the Evening Dispatch as news editor.

In between the day jobs and play writing, he managed to spend some time as a football commentator for Radio Scotland, but he finally left for England to join the Rank Organisation in the late 1950s. There he learnt the film business at close hand and provided scripts for Rank’s B-pictures (entitled The Edgar Wallace Mysteries) and TV series Interpol Calling (1959-60).

And so began a writing career that resulted in his name appearing on the credits of many classic and fondly remembered series including Dr Finlay’s Casebook (1964-65), The Avengers, (1965-66), Adam Adamant Lives (1966), Callan (1967-69), Public Eye (1968), Special Branch (1969), Jason King (1972), Arthur of the Britons (1973), The Sweeney (1975), The Legend of Robin Hood (1975) and Charles Endell, Esq (1980). To distinguish himself from similarly named writers he adopted his mother Agnes’s maiden name, Banks, when the work began to take off.

He contributed two stories from the golden era of Doctor Who, produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and starring Tom Baker as the Time Lord. Terror of the Zygons (1975) was set in his native Scotland, replete with an inscrutable ghillie called The Caber, a friendly publican played by resident TV Scotsman Angus Lennie and, of course, the Loch Ness Monster. Nessie is explained away as a cyborg under the control of the shape-shifting alien Zygons, who have programmed it to attack local oil rigs as a test of strength. The Zygons have endured for long enough to be resurrected in the show’s 50th anniversary episode and again in the latest series with Peter Capaldi.

His follow-up story The Seeds of Doom (1976) is another classic featuring an alien seed pod which germinates thanks to a mad botanist and begins to take control of the Earth’s vegetation.

His biggest legacy, however, will be the programmes he created. Charged by the BBC with conceiving a follow-up to their tough cop show Target, Stewart decided to follow the American example of a series like Columbo which focused on one distinctive main character instead of an ensemble. He also rejected his boss’s suggestion that the series be set in Slough and that he should cast a big name and so Shoestring (1979-80) was born - set in Bristol, with a young Trevor Eve as a former computer expert who, post nervous breakdown, becomes the local radio station’s private investigator. Distinctive enough to pull in big audiences it also won a BAFTA.

Eve declined the chance to do a third series so Stewart came up with another show, Bergerac (1981-91). John Nettles’s Jim Bergerac was another complex central figure - a recovering alcoholic emerging from a messy divorce - who was a detective attached to Jersey’s Bureau des Etrangers. When the show finished in 1991m Stewart produced the first series of the television version of HE Bates’ The Darling Buds Of May, adapting some of the episodes himself and approving the casting of the then-unknown Catherine Zeta Jones in a lead role.

As a script editor he worked on Armchair Theatre (1966-67) and Van der Valk (1973) and as producer he was in charge of Lovejoy (1986), Call Me Mister (1986), and Hannay (1988-89).

His first novel The Hurricane’s Tale, was published when he was 81 and his memoirs, To Put You In The Picture, in which he described his television career with good humour and great humility came out late last year. With typical self-effacement he did not want his picture on the cover as he felt his story should be about the programmes rather than himself.

His first marriage was a short lived teenage romance which produced a daughter who survives him, as do three sons from a second marriage which also ended in divorce.

TOBY HADOKE