Philip Barlow Oakes was a British journalist, poet and novelist. He was an author, with Tony Hancock, of screenplay The Punch and Judy Man, 1962; author, with Desmond Morris, of more than 150 filmscripts on animal behavior; author of documentary programs and plays for television.
Background
Philip Barlow Oakes was born on January 31, 1928, in Burslem, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom to Sam Oakes, a traveler, and Constance (Barlow) Oakes, a teacher. At the age of four Oakes' father died and at the age of eight, his mother developed a brain tumor. She was unable to look after him and so placed him into the care of the Royal Orphanage in Wolverhampton.
Education
Philip attended school in Darwen, Lancashire, England.
Career
At 16, complete with school certificate, Philip left for London and the traditional start in journalism, as a copy boy.
As the second world war was reaching its end, Oakes was called up for military service, sent to the Middle East and eventually co-opted on to the staff of a troops newspaper published in Athens. On demobilization, he resumed his career in London, working at first for a news agency that covered the police courts. Speed and getting the names right counted for more than literary skills, but out of court he was fast making a name as a poet with contributions to reviews and small magazines. He went on to publish half a dozen novels, three matchless volumes of autobiography and three collections of verse.
His journalistic career was also soon on the up and up. He was one of the young lions - along with Bernard Levin and Alan Brien - on the political weekly Truth. In ensuing years, he worked for the Evening Standard, was film critic of the Sunday Telegraph and filled a variety of functions at the Sunday Times, including the Atticus gossip column.
For ABC Television, he helped device and produce The Sunday Break, a programme aimed at teenagers, and which inspired his novel The God Botherers. Another programme, Zoo Time, for Granada, led to a long collaboration and friendship with Desmond Morris. On the radio, he was a regular guest on Robert Robinson's Stop the Week. And an acquaintance with Tony Hancock, struck up when they lived in the same corner of Surrey, resulted in Oakes being asked to furnish the story and screenplay of the comedian's second feature film, The Punch and Judy Man.
When he settled in Gilly's native Lincolnshire, he tended the garden and reviewed crime fiction for the Literary Review.
To every subject he wrote on - the cinema, wildlife or, in his poems, love, marriage and jogging along together - he brought burning enthusiasm. He died on December 18, 2005.
Philip married Stella Fleming, a librarian, on September 9, 1950. They divorced in 1986. He married Gilly Hodson, a director of a public relations company and writer, in 1986. He had three children: Susan Jill, Toby Alan, Josy.