Andrew Nickolds, who has died aged 73, was one of the most gifted and prolific, if largely unsung, TV and radio comedy writers of his generation. And he sustained a career in that precarious world for nearly half a century.
He had his first big success in 1980, in collaboration with Stan Hey, when they scripted the second and third series of the popular sitcom Agony, starring Maureen Lipman as an agony aunt who could not solve her own problems. They later took over writing The Lenny Henry Show when the star was beginning to cement his place in the British pantheon.
