William Humble, who has died of prostate cancer aged 75, was a television dramatist whose best plays were based on real life, telling remarkable stories of triumph over adversity and portraying the flawed characters of those in the public eye.
He made his first impression on screen with the moving but unsentimental BBC production On Giant’s Shoulders (1979), about Terry Wiles, born with disabilities caused by the drug thalidomide, and how these affect the poverty-stricken couple who adopt him. Wiles played himself; Judi Dench and Bryan Pringle, as the middle-aged, childless adoptive parents, displayed the gamut of emotions from warmth and sympathy to pragmatism, bitterness and resentment.
Humble and the play’s director, Anthony Simmons, adapted it from Marjorie Wallace and Michael Robson’s 1976 book, and their sensitive treatment earned it an International Emmy award.
Another tale of the impact of illness on family relationships flowed from Humble’s pen in Virtuoso (1989), about John Ogdon, the British pianist who suffered a mental breakdown a decade after winning the International Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Alfred Molina starred as Ogdon, with Alison Steadman playing his wife, Brenda Lucas. One critic described Humble’s script as “dazzling in its discipline and perception”.
During a break in filming, Humble and Molina discovered that they shared an admiration for the actor Tony Hancock, who starred in the classic sitcom Hancock’s Half Hour before a descent into alcoholism and self-destruction that culminated in his suicide in 1968.
Eighteen months after shooting Virtuoso, Humble sent Molina the script for Hancock. Screened in 1991, it followed the last seven years of the star’s life, which Humble saw as “a Greek tragedy”. Molina put on a stone in weight and wore blue contact lenses to take on the title role. Humble subsequently acknowledged that critics were divided 50:50 over the play’s merits, some feeling he was too kind to his subject. “I adored him,” Humble told the Stage. “I didn’t want to destroy the man, just tell the story as I saw it.”
The writer was slightly less protective about reputations with his last television work, Whatever Love Means (2005), the story of the then Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles before his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. The title was based on the now King’s famous response while being interviewed at the time of his engagement to Diana. Laurence Fox and Olivia Poulet starred as Charles and Camilla, with Michelle Duncan as Diana.
Kevin O’Sullivan described it in the Sunday Mirror as a “ridiculously racy romp”, while Fiona Sturges, writing in the Independent, saw it as “a Jilly Cooper love story without the bare bums”.
Humble was born in Carshalton, Surrey, to Frank, an insurance agent, and his wife, Frances (nee Dennis). One of his reports at Wallingford county grammar school contained the line: “William must learn that a pretty turn of phrase is no substitute for learning hard facts.” Proving his teacher wrong, he wrote a book, A Tale of Arthur, a fantasy on the theme of King Arthur, when he was 15. It was published three years later, in 1967, but his next two literary proposals were rejected.
Although he studied drama at Birmingham University, Humble decided that his future lay in writing rather than acting. He worked as a teacher, and became head of English at a prep school, while churning out plays in his spare time. When he wrote one about London media types and submitted it to the BBC, the corporation hired him in 1973 to read scripts. He quickly became a script editor on Softly Softly: Task Force (from 1973 to 1974), the 1976 series of When the Boat Comes In and several plays.
Turning freelance, he wrote episodes of children’s series such as The Paper Lads (in 1978 and 1979) and Flambards (1979), the soap opera Emmerdale Farm (in 1979), All Creatures Great and Small (in 1980) and Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981).
Following On Giant’s Shoulders, Humble wrote a string of his own television plays over a quarter of a century, beginning with Rules of Justice (1981), the real-life story of three boys wrongly jailed for murder. Alan Howard starred in both Talk to Me (1984), about an architect undergoing psychoanalysis (Humble had done the same after suffering from depression, but denied the drama was autobiographical), and Poppyland (1985), on the relationship between the Victorian playwright and theatre critic Clement Scott and a Norfolk miller’s daughter, Louie Jermy.
Later came Ex (1991), a comedy with Griff Rhys Jones as a TV soap writer unable to cope with his former wife’s new relationship and forthcoming baby (an attempt to put the British middle classes under the spotlight in the manner of Woody Allen’s takes on moneyed New Yorkers); Royal Celebration (1993), Humble’s first look at Charles and Diana’s marriage, seen through the eyes of a street party at the time; and Too Good to Be True (2003), another tale of a divorcee (played by Peter Davison) struggling with his ex-wife finding a new lover, this time with extreme consequences.
Humble also enjoyed adapting PD James’s novel The Black Tower for a six-part 1985 serialisation. He returned to her works to script two miniseries of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1997-98). His other contributions to established series included episodes of Poirot (in 1992) and Maigret (1992-93).
For the stage, Humble wrote Fly Away Home (Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, 1983), starring Hywel Bennett in the story of a troubled marriage, and What a Performance (Queen’s theatre, 1994), with David Suchet as the comedian Sid Field. Humble also scripted the two-part BBC Radio 4 monologue The Performer (2021), which featured Stephen Fry recalling the mysterious disappearance of a boy’s father.
Humble is survived by his second wife, the author Caroline Bugler, whom he married in 2014, and Edward and Catherine, the children of his first marriage, to Sue Rolph in 1974, which ended in divorce, as well as by his sister Liz.
• William Frank Wilkinson Humble, writer, born 22 December 1948; died 15 October 2024
