An award-winning writer and broadcaster, agony uncle, film critic and fanatical fisherman, Nick Fisher, who has died unexpectedly aged 63, had a varied, energetic working life.
In recent years, he was well known for his work with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, with whom he wrote The River Cottage Fish Book (2007); he also starred alongside him on TV shows including River Cottage: Gone Fishing (2007), and in 2010 wrote a volume, Sea Fishing, for the River Cottage Handbook series.
Fearnley-Whittingstall had been a fan of Fisher’s irreverent 1990s Channel 4 fishing series, Screaming Reels, which was never out of the Channel 4 Top 20, and his BBC Radio 5 Live show, Dirty Tackle. “We talked about fishing endlessly,” Fearnley-Whittingstall said of his friend. “But we also talked about life, a subject on which Nick was an expert because he had lived so much of it.” As well as presenting, Fisher wrote for television, including an award-winning children’s series, The Giblet Boys (2005), and many episodes of Holby City.
From 1985 to 2004, Fisher was also a beloved agony uncle for the teenage girls’ magazine Just Seventeen. His warm, witty style, like a caring older brother, quietly revolutionised the way young women – and men – thought about their lives and their bodies.
In 1993, he wrote a guide to safe sex, commissioned by the Health Education Authority; the authority neglected to mention on the cover that the book was for consenting adults. After criticism by tabloid newspapers including the Daily Mail, who doorstepped Fisher’s mother, Olive, to ask her about her son’s “sexual proclivities” – as Fisher recalled to Richard Coles on Radio 4’s Saturday Live in 2011 – it was banned and pulped.
“I don’t believe this government has teenagers’ interests at heart”, he told the Socialist Review in 1994. “Have they actually thought about how many teenagers are getting pregnant, how many are screwed up because they don’t know whether they are gay or straight, how many are not using condoms because they don’t know where to buy them or how to use them properly?” Penguin eventually published the book in 1994 with a DayGlo cherub riding a bright pink phallic rocket on its cover.
The son of David Fisher, a TV writer for series including Doctor Who and Dixon of Dock Green, and his wife, Olive (nee Wilson), a secretary, Fisher grew up in Glasgow with two older sisters. He remembered the first fish he caught “in uncanny detail”: a wrasse, with his toy rod.
His parents later separated, and he lived in Cromer, north Norfolk, in his early teens, before leaving Paston school, and hitch-hiking around Europe. “I remember selling my blood to buy a roast chicken in Greece,” he told the Times in 2011.
He also studied history of art of the University of Sussex. Moving to London after that, he worked as a painter and decorator, dustman, sandwich board carrier and art and antiques dealer, until his stock was destroyed in a fire in a warehouse where he was renting some space. Finding himself homeless, with nothing but two articles from a design magazine to his name, he reinvented himself as a freelance journalist.
In 1985 he started working at Just Seventeen, where he interviewed celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Kylie Minogue, wrote news, features and short fiction, and soon began writing an advice column, A Boy’s View. He was still the agony uncle in the magazine’s final year, 2004, his column now called Your... Boy Worries.
Fisher also freelanced for many others newspapers and magazines, and was the Sun’s film critic in the 90s, scoring the films in fishy terms: they were either “fintastic”, “worth a fry” or “codswallop”. In 1999, he wrote the adapted screenplay for Virtual Sexuality, about a teenage girl who accidentally brings her dream man to life, and in 2002, a BBC Two sitcom Manchild, about men dealing with the messy moments of midlife, which starred Nigel Havers and Anthony Head.
Other TV work included episodes of New Tricks, EastEnders, Casualty and Hustle, and The Giblet Boys, a Children’s ITV series about three adventurous brothers, which won the best drama award at the Children’s Baftas in 2006.
While a 2011 touring stage play, Basket Case, led by Havers, and a 2016 thriller novel, Pot Luck, set around the crabbing trade in Weymouth, exercised Fisher’s talents off-screen, his work as a senior writer for Holby City, for which he wrote 44 episodes (2010-20), defined his later years.
Kate Oates, head of continuing drama at BBC Studios, said he was always “kind, welcoming and inclusive; a joy to work alongside.” The show’s producer, Simon Harper, called him “one of our most gifted core writers” who “wrote many of our most memorable episodes”, adding that he was passionate about bringing rural life into his stories.
Fisher moved to Hooke, Dorset, in 2001 with his wife, Helen, a fellow writer whom he married in 1992, and their young sons, Rory and Rex; two more children, Patrick and Kitty, followed. Embracing rural life, Fisher kept cows, chickens, ducks and pigs, and taught himself to use a digger to make his own trout fishing lake.
In a 2021 Guardian article, he wrote about his lifelong love of fishing being “about escape. Escape from the city. Escape from computer screens and desks, to feel the bite of the east wind blow straight off the Russian steppes across the North Sea and into my face.”
He is survived by Helen and his children.
• Nick Fisher, journalist, writer, broadcaster and fisher, born 14 August 1959; found dead 17 November 2022
