FOR two decades the writer Wilfred Greatorex wrote and devised a range of television dramas, many becoming popular examples of the genre, such as his personal favourite, the 1960s hit The Plane Makers. Under the guiding hand of Lew Grade, for whom he worked at the independent station Associated Television for several years, he supplied a myriad scripts, covering subjects from the aviation business and the newspaper industry to spy adventures and international arms dealing.

Wilfred Greatorex was born in Blackburn in 1922, the oldest son of a former soldier; his younger brother, Gerald, who was born with Down’s syndrome, died at the age of seven. Wilfred was the only boy from his school to win a scholarship to Blackburn Grammar School, where he excelled in sport, especially boxing. But when his father felt that he was neglecting his academic studies, he was forced to reduce the amount of time he dedicated to pursuing his sporting interests.

He left grammar school intending to study politics at Oxford but when the Second World War was declared in 1939, Greatorex and his fellow pupils in his sixth-form class volunteered for active service; although they were too young to join the Royal Air Force by a matter of months, their football team allowed the teenagers to use the football pitch in their drive to keep fit until they could fight for their country.

As soon as he reached the age of 18 Greatorex joined the RAF intending to be a fighter pilot but while attending selection tests at Cranwell, the RAF’s college in Lincolnshire, a weakness was discovered in his vision and this put paid to his plans, so he was allocated to bomber squadrons.

When he was demobbed he took up journalism, beginning with a Blackburn paper, then in London on Reynold’s News, the Co-operative Movement’s Sunday newspaper. By this time he had married his childhood sweetheart, Beryl, who had also grown up in Blackburn.

By the 1960s, Greatorex was writing for television, primarily Lew Grade’s Associated Television. A protégé of Grade, he went on to supply scripts for several popular series of the era, including Man in a Suitcase and Danger Man but his big breakthrough came with The Plane Makers, later retitled The Power Game. Between 1963 and 1966 he edited scripts with John Whitney and Geoffrey Bellman for this popular drama series focusing on the aviation industry. Later the series centred on the life of the ambitious and ruthless tycoon John Wilder, played by Patrick Wymark.

As a replacement for the successful aviation-based series, Greatorex and the producer Rex Firkin turned their attentions to Fleet Street. Front Page Story saw Firkin’s production crew use a special mobile self-contained tape and recording machine, affording them the chance to shoot scenes on the run.

During the late 1960s Greatorex wrote for the big screen, adapting Jon Cleary’s novel The High Commissioner, into Nobody Runs Forever for Rank, and co-writing 1969’s Battle of Britain with James Kennaway.

His final work for ATV, before supplying scripts to London Weekend’s suspense series The Frighteners, and moving on to write for the BBC, was Hine, a 13-part series he created and produced himself, concerning a freelance arms dealer. At the BBC his brief was to develop new ideas for television, in addition to writing his own material, such as 1990, starring Edward Woodward, in 1977. Although a second series was commissioned a year later, the programme, which was seen as Greatorex’s personal and alarming vision of the near future when bureaucracy had run riot and the country was ruled by the Department of Public Control, was not deemed a success. The same year he devised Secret Army, the Second World War drama series, with the producer Gerard Glaister. The programme later inspired the writers David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd to pen their hit sitcom, ’Allo, ’Allo.

The last series Greatorex created was Airline, for Yorkshire Television in 1982. Set in the postwar 1940s, the programme followed the adventures of a demobbed pilot Jack Ruskin, played by Roy Marsden, who eked out a living with his own one-plane airline.

His writing extended to novels, including The Button Zone, Crossover and The Freelancers, and the non-fiction title, Diamond Fever, but when his wife Beryl died, some ten years ago, he never wrote again. Unable to come to terms with her death, he told his friend, the fellow writer and producer Anthony Read, that everything he wrote had been for Beryl and her loss meant there was no longer any incentive.

Wilfred Greatorex, who had been an active member of the National Union of Journalists and the Writers’ Guild, lived out his final years in a house his wife, who had always dreamt of becoming an architect, designed on Berry Hill in the Buckinghamshire village of Taplow.

His health deteriorated after suffering mild strokes and a fall. He died of renal failure.

Wilfred Greatorex, writer and television script editor, was born in Blackburn on May 27, 1922. He died in Taplow on October 14, 2002, aged 80.