David Turner

Background

Turner was born in Birmingham and came from a working-class background.

Education

He studied French at Birmingham University and subsequently worked as a school teacher in that city.

Career

He is best remembered for his stage play Semi-Detached, first performed during 1962, which reached Broadway and was made into the film All the Way Up (1970). He prepared modern versions of classic plays including John Gay"s The Beggar"s Opera, a version seen in London in 1968, and The Miser by Molière, which was performed at the Birmingham Representative in 1973. At this event, which first brought Mrs Whitehouse to national attention, he accused her of attacking creative freedoms.

The creator of Swizzlewick (British Broadcasting Corporation 1964), a twice weekly comedy drama, he wrote an episode of the series featuring possibly the earliest parody of the morality campaigner.

Way Office Beat, another suburban comedy like Semi-Detached, was transmitted as part of The Wednesday Play anthology series in June 1966. Critic John Russell Taylor thought Turner had "revivified the Jonsonian comedy of humours".

Turner was for a time a scriptwriter on The Archers, the British Broadcasting Corporation radio soap opera. He also adapted literary works for television

A five part version of Germinal, from the 1885 novel by Émile Zola, was transmitted early in 1970 and Roads to Freedom (also 1970) was a thirteen-part adaptation of the novel of that name by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Both were nominated for several British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards including one for Turner"s version of Sartre"s work. He also wrote versions of Stella Gibbons" Cold Comfort Farm (1968) based on her comic classic and North and South (1975) from the 1855 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. He died, aged 63, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

Achievements

• An early opponent of the "Clean-Up television" founder Mary Whitehouse he interrupted the initial meeting at Birmingham Town Hall in April 1964 as an audience member.