Philip Broadley helped make TV mogul Sir Lew Grade a very rich and happy man, for it was his script for the Danger Man episode Don’t Nail Him Yet that sold the series in 1964 to the American TV network CBS.

Grade rewarded Broadley with a crate of the finest scotch and an annually renewed contract — the only scriptwriter to work for ITC (Grade’s production company) given such an honour. When asked about the sale of Danger Man (retitled as Secret Agent in America) to CBS the screenwriter made one of his typical quips: “I think I must have kept him in cigars for a week!”

His old friend, the actor Alexander Davion, described Broadley as “unique character who felt life was absurd but wonderful and was a genius with dialogue — he wrote things an actor could say with ease”.

Philip John Broadley was born in Baildon, Yorkshire in 1922. His father was a well-known portrait photographer, painter and top professional chess player for Britain. During the war he served in the RAF seeing action in North Africa where he shot down dive-bombing Stukas as part of a ground-based artillery unit in Egypt before being posted to India.

After being demobbed in 1946, he studied at RADA alongside Davion, and Nigel Green. He also met his best friend, Robert Shaw and his future wife, Margaret McCall, whom he nicknamed “Lauren” because she looked like the Hollywood heartthrob Lauren Bacall, and her surname also rhymed - they married in 1951.

On leaving RADA they worked together for several years in provincial theatre, among them Amersham and Derby Reps, and West End shows including a Noel Coward musical, Ace of Clubs, at the Cambridge Theatre. They both moved away from acting to pursue separate careers. She joined BBC TV and went on to produce some of the corporation’s finest arts and music documentaries in the 1960s and 1970s, introducing numerous writers and artists to television for the first time. Among them were Lawrence Durrell, with whom she developed a special friendship, John Betjeman, who likewise became a close friend, Robert Graves and Graham Sutherland.

Boradley turned his hand to scriptwriting entering a competition that he won with a play called Annabella in 1957. The play was quickly snapped up by a television producer, but Broadley never saw the transmission as he had left for New York to write and research his first novel In the Key of Black.

The couple returned to Britain in 1960 and Broadley found work writing teleplays for ITV which brought him to the attention of Danger Man producer Ralph Smart. Broadley quickly established himself as Smart's preferred writer for the series that made Patrick McGoohan a household name and the highest paid actor on television at the time. Smart admired Broadley’s clever dialogue and numerous literary references. He also admired his thorough research of Cold War espionage, basing some of his scripts on real life spies such as Morris and Lona Cohen, also known as Peter and Helen Kroger, and contemporary issues such as the Cuban Revolution.

The two men enjoyed the sort of relationship that Broadley could have easily scripted; Smart a tax exile living just outside Barcelona, would meet with the writer at his Spanish retreat, or on occasion, on the Dover to Calais ferry when the producer would stay in the bar on the boat, meet with Broadley who would deliver his latest script and then discuss his ideas for his next commission.

The two men would enjoy eating and drinking a considerable amount during the journey to France where Smart would depart leaving the writer to enjoy the journey back knowing that all his expenses were being paid for by ITC. Broadley later said of Smart: “The great thing about Ralph was that he didn’t f*** about with your script. Some of the other script editors on those ITC series would wreck your plotlines”.

Broadley enjoyed creating numerous gadgets for the series. “I had great fun inventing them: I did the razor that doubled up as a mini tape recorder” and to the frustration of McGoohan, always made sure his scripts included sophisticated female characters that would have a air of mystery and an implied chemistry between the two. It was while working on that Lew Grade put Broadley under contract. This document did not go into details on how many scripts the writer would need to deliver annually, his salary or what was expected of him: it simply stated that he could not write for any other company than ITC. Broadley said of the contract: “I went from living on Kit Kats and kippers to earning more money than the Prime Minister!”

By the end of the sixties he had contributed twenty scripts for a number of series including The Saint, Man In A Suitcase, The Champions and Department S, a series that saw Peter Wyngarde in the lead role of Jason King, a writer of crime-thrillers and undercover Interpol agent. Broadley ensured much of his own debonair and dandyish character would come to life on-screen in Wyngarde's character.