Andrew Payne, who has died aged 74, was a television scriptwriter who did much to contribute to the popularity of Minder, the comedy-drama featuring George Cole as the dodgy used-car dealer Arthur Daley, but he found great personal success with his own creation, Pie in the Sky, which starred Richard Griffiths as a sleuthing chef, Henry Crabbe.
The programme, which ran for five series from 1994 to 1997, took its title from the name of the restaurant opened by Crabbe, a retired detective effectively blackmailed into returning to police work on tricky cases with the fictional Westershire force by Assistant Chief Constable Freddy Fisher (played by Malcolm Sinclair).
“I quite liked detective shows, but I wanted to do a cop show that was anti-cop shows,” Payne told the Stage in 1996. “It was a challenge to make Richard a policeman who didn’t want to be one. I like reluctant heroes, and Crabbe would rather be in the kitchen making an omelette than out solving crime.”
A kitchen was also the setting for Payne’s first Minder script in 1980. It was the penultimate episode of the first series – which had begun the previous year – and had Terry McCann (Dennis Waterman) going undercover in a Greek restaurant during a family feud over its ownership.
Payne wrote another 11 episodes of the programme, which combined action sequences with wit and humour, before leaving – as did Waterman – at the end of the seventh series, in 1989. “It did get more comedic,” Payne told Paul Stenning, the host of a Minder podcast, in 2022. “It could so easily have become a vehicle for George, with Dennis Waterman as his straight man. I always tried to give Dennis good stuff to do – I mean drama as opposed to comedy – because he’s a very good actor.”
Payne was chosen to script the 1985 feature-length Christmas special, Minder on the Orient Express. “What do you want tickets to a Chinese takeaway for?” Arthur asks Terry.
He also contributed episodes to crime series such as Shoestring (in 1980), which starred Trevor Eve as a radio phone-in host and private detective, Pulaski (in 1987), featuring David Andrews as a priest-turned-private eye, and Lovejoy (in 1992 and 1993), with Ian McShane as an antiques dealer-cum-amateur sleuth.
He wrote 11 episodes of Midsomer Murders (between 2002 and 2011), during John Nettles’s stint as Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby, and one story for DCI Banks (in 2012), starring Stephen Tompkinson.
Payne first had success on his own when he wrote Nightlife (1982) for the ITV Playhouse anthology series. It dramatised the tension that follows when a man (Michael Troughton) returns to his flat from a party with a woman (Claire Lewis) and, against his will, is joined by an aggressive neighbour (David Hayman).
His next single play, Love After Lunch (1987), for the BBC, was a comedy of manners starring Denis Lawson, whose character attends counselling sessions when his marriage is falling apart, only to discover that the leader of the group is having an affair with his wife.
Payne explored relationship issues again in the groundbreaking 1993 BBC miniseries You, Me and It. Based on the difficulty experienced by the drama’s producer, Alex Graham, in conceiving his first child, it featured a former rugby international (James Wilby) and his wife (Suzanne Burden) facing infertility problems.
“I wanted to touch all aspects of the couple’s lives and explore how infertility and the stress it creates affects their relationship with each other, their friends, family and colleagues,” Payne said. As with all his work, he sought to find some humour in the story, which he said “creeps in naturally” once the characters are developed.
Payne was born in Bovey Tracey, Devon, to Joan (nee Landamore) and Dudley Payne, and studied at Denstone college, Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, and Hornsey College of Art (1969-72) in London. He worked as a screenprinter until breaking through as a writer with the BBC Radio 4 play Danger! Man at Work! (1980). His agent sent him to Linda Agran, Minder’s script executive, and his television career took off.
He adapted stories by Dick Francis for a 1989 TV series based around the adventures of the fictional Jockey Club investigator David Cleveland (McShane). There were classy period pieces: Dead Gorgeous, Payne’s 2002 version of Peter Lovesey’s post-second world war novel On the Edge, which starred Fay Ripley and Helen McCrory as women planning to murder each other’s husbands – a stylish variation on the Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train; and Malice Aforethought (2005), from Anthony Berkeley Cox’s novel, with Ben Miller as a 1920s doctor who seduces, then murders, his victims.
Payne’s later stage plays, such as Plan B (2008) and Don’t Go There (2018), were championed by Robert Plagnol, an actor and producer who translated them for French theatre and festival performances. His 2013 play The Meeting was directed by Lawson at Hampstead theatre in 2016.
Payne’s 1973 marriage to Julia Manheim ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Nicola (nee Gibson), whom he married in 2014, and his stepdaughters, Phoebe and Florence.
• Andrew Charles Jervis Payne, television scriptwriter, born 13 September 1949; died 12 January 2024
