Career
Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where his contemporaries were Alan Bennett and Russell Harty, he joined British Broadcasting Corporation Television initially working as a programme planner. Shifting to programme production he came to know the producer Cedric Messina, responsible for adaptations of classic plays, and worked with him on such anthology series as Play of the Month. Under Messina, Shallcross worked as script editor on the first twelve productions in the British Broadcasting Corporation Television Shakespeare cycle.
He was the producer of such single plays (in this case with Jack Levin) as Ian Curteis" Churchill and the Generals (1979) and several episodes of the BBC2 Playhouse series.
One of his last productions was a serial adaptation of the Oswald Wynd novel The Ginger Tree (1989) co-produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Japanese broadcaster Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai and WGBH Boston. Alan Shallcross retired in the late 1990s, moving to Settle in Yorkshire.
