Wilfred Greatorex, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Wilfred Greatorex

British writer

Date of Birth: 27-May-1921

Place of Birth: Liverpool, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 14-Oct-2002

Profession: screenwriter, television producer, science fiction writer

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Gemini


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About Wilfred Greatorex

  • Wilfred Glyn Greatorex (27 May 1921 – 14 October 2002) was an English television and film writer, script editor and producer.
  • He was creator of such series as Secret Army, 1990, Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game, Hine, Brett, Man At The Top, Man From Haven and The Inheritors.
  • He also wrote the screenplay for the 1969 film Battle of Britain.
  • He was described by The Guardian newspaper as "one of the most prolific and assured of television script-writers and editors from the 1960s into the 1980s".
  • Starting off as a journalist, he got his big break as a TV writer on Lew Grade's ATV service writing dramas about journalism, such as Deadline Midnight and Front Page Story.As a TV script editor he also worked on series such as Danger Man and was also creator/producer of The Inheritors, Hine and The Power Game.
  • Papers discovered at a Norfolk auction house in 2011 reveal that 'Hine' had a budget of £84,000, the equivalent of close to £1m some forty years later. In 1977, he came up with the dystopian drama series 1990 for BBC2, starring Edward Woodward.
  • Greatorex dubbed the series "Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six".
  • Over its two series it portrayed "a Britain in which the rights of the individual had been replaced by the concept of the common good – or, as I put it more brutally, a consensus tyranny." The same year he also devised (with Gerard Glaister) the BBC1 wartime drama Secret Army.
  • The show later inspired the sitcom parody 'Allo 'Allo!.When talking about his writing style he said "I am opposed to soft-centred characters, which is why I don't create a lot of Robin Hoods.
  • The world's full of hard cases, real villains.
  • And they need to be confronted with other characters just as hard."His last series for television was Airline in 1982 (starring Roy Marsden).
  • He died in of renal failure in Buckinghamshire in 2002.

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