WILLIS HALL was a man of the theatre who must have moved more people at different ages than any other playwright of his generation. This is mainly because he wrote as often for young people as adults, a habit he formed right at the start of his career. Later, with Keith Waterhouse, he formed one of the most remarkable writing partnerships in British dramatic history. As a friendship it endured for all their lives; they were the same age; born in the same Yorkshire town; first met at the age of 12; went to the same school; worked together on a youth club magazine; and as a professional collaboration it yielded nearly every kind of play and film to suit the taste of the times.

If Hall, who first suggested in 1959 the idea of joining forces, had the edge as a dramatist, it was because he had already achieved a West End success in The Long and the Short and the Tall, a sharply-written anti-war play which the Royal Court Theatre had seized in its heyday under Lindsay Anderson. There were other plays, too, one-acters, such as Last Day in Dreamland and A Glimpse of the Sea, which had already proved him a dramatist with a future. But it was the first play, set in the Malayan jungle, which had begun life at the Edinburgh Festival for amateurs and was acted at Nottingham professionally, which awoke Londoners to the fact that John Osborne had provoked a competitor with this arresting tale of a seven-man British Army patrol wondering what to do with a Japanese prisoner.

But regardless of whether one was more of a dramatist than the other, they began working together, and found a smart Mayfair office in which to do so. By exchanging dialogue and gags as they worked on a plot over two desks, they produced one play or musical after another which almost unfailingly struck a chord with undemanding playgoers and filmgoers — the bulk of their admirers.

Critics whose duties crossed their path from time to time would enjoy the result. There were, however, only a handful of plays and films and television programmes which everyone agreed represented an authentic regional comedy to make everyone sit up. One was the different versions for the straight and musical theatre which they culled from Waterhouse’s novel, Billy Liar; the first a long-running play about a dreamy youth (Albert Finney, then Tom Courtenay) who kept spinning tales about his adolescent job as undertaker; the second a musical at Drury Lane, Billy, with Michael Crawford as the angling, provocative youth; and two outstanding films, Whistle Down The Wind and A Kind of Loving.

Their joint success brought them early visits together to New York and Hollywood. They found themselves, for example, escaping obliteration in a car driven by 82-year-old Gladys Cooper because she was too vain to wear glasses. Neither man would ever learn to drive. Both could by then afford taxis; and though both men had been brought up in the same kind of Leeds back-to-back, Hall stuck to Yorkshire, coming up to London from time to time, and never losing in voice or manner his Yorkshire roots and accent or his tendency not to speak more than necessary.

Willis Hall was born in Leeds and educated at Leeds Cockburn High School. He first met Waterhouse at Mill Hill Youth Club, where they co-discovered their mutual love for writing, and both began contributing to local magazines. Hall later joined the Army in the Far East, where he began writing fairy stories for Chinese children on the radio. He also began writing plays, and after his return to Britain, his Disciplines of War appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 1957, which in turn was retitled — and produced professionally — as Boys, It’s All Hell at the Nottingham Playhouse. In turn, in 1959, it became The Long and the Short and the Tall, at the Royal Court, directed by Lindsay Anderson.

After the first triumph of Billy Liar in 1959, with its beautifully detailed study of youthful frustration and observation, Hall took on something alone. He translated and adapted for the London stage a play which already puzzled the French, Billetdoux’s Chin-Chin, which Anthony Quayle and Celia Johnson gave at Wyndham’s.

Later the “firm” was understandably considered capable of doing anything as long as there was a laugh or two in it. Celebration, for example, transferred to the West End from Nottingham as a riotously funny study of a wedding and a funeral in terms of homely, North-Country comedy. Some critics thought it as good as anything they had written; but without a star name like Finney or Courtenay, what was the use?

They next tried a revue, England, Our England, in the days when revue was still just in fashion (though the material would go better on television in That Was The Week That Was); and All Things Bright and Beautiful, again set in the North of England, and then (somewhat surprisingly) came a sophisticated sex comedy, Say Who You Are, which ran and ran at Her Majesty’s, about a borrowed flat in Kensington, with Ian Carmichael and Patrick Cargill amid the extra-marital exertions.

After Whoops-a-Daisy and a version of Arnold Bennett’s The Card came their adaptations of Eduardo de Filippo’s popular Neapolitan family comedies, Saturday, Sunday, Mon- day (with a cameo for Laurence Olivier) and Filumena (1977) (for Joan Plowright). Were they better, on the whole, with North-country comedy? It became a matter for argument.

The fact is that they worked together like clockwork. No one ever spotted the wheels going round. There was always so much to do — journalism, television, writing of one sort or another — that they had no time or inclination to sound the least pretentious.

Hall wrote superbly for children by not writing down to them. Many people would rate Hall’s work in the Worzel Gummidge series for television as good as anything he did. It would be absurd to overlook, too, his passion for football and the Magic Circle. Nevertheless they gave the public a regular taste of mostly Northern family life with sympathy, sense, sensibility and wit without the class war.

In 1989 Hall found Adam Faith to star at the Cambridge in a version of the television series, Budgie; but musicals were also one of Hall’s hobbies. They may not have produced anything sensational, but Hall loved having a hand in them. With Denis King as composer, Hall’s The Wind in the Willows and Treasure Island went down well in 1985; and in 1987 came The Water Babies; and Peter Pan (1988) with George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.

As for Hall’s fiction for children, which had begun during his early years in China on National Service with scripts for the wireless, the Vampire stories, from 1982, were perhaps his most successful.

If there was one thing to congratulate Hall on, apart from his always being himself, it was the scope every text gave to the actor. Unlike more prominently acknowledged exponents of the new wave of dramaturgy — and Hall was one of the earliest Royal Court writers to be taken seriously — he could not help bringing characters to life on the stage.

He is survived by four sons.

Willis Hall, writer, was born on April 6, 1929. He died on March 7, 2005, aged 75.