Charlotte Bingham

Charlotte Bingham (29 June 1942 – 16 November 2025) was an English novelist who wrote over 30 mainly historical romance novels and also wrote for many television programmes including Upstairs, Downstairs; Play for Today; and Robin's Nest. In her television work, she often worked with her husband, Terence Brady.

Life and career

Early life Charlotte Mary Thérèse Bingham was born on 29 June 1942 in Haywards Heath, Sussex. Her father, John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, wrote detective stories and was a secret member of MI5. Her mother, Madeleine Bingham, née Madeleine Mary Ebel, was a playwright and biographer. Bingham first attended a school in London, but from the age of seven to 16, she went to the Priory School in Haywards Heath. when she was 19, and not long before her twentieth birthday a literary agent discovered her celebrating at the Ritz. He was a friend of her parents and he took off the finished manuscript of her autobiography.

Television work In 1966, her first novel, Lucinda, was published. This was later adapted into a TV screenplay. Coronet Among the Grass, her second autobiography (1972), dealt with the first ten years of her marriage to fellow writer Terence Brady. The couple, who have two children, later adapted Coronet Among the Grass and Coronet Among the Weeds, into the TV sitcom No, Honestly. Bingham and her husband collaborated on the scripts for three early episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, "Board Wages", "I Dies from Love" and "Out of the Everywhere". They later wrote an accompanying book called Rose's Story. They also wrote the episodes of Take Three Girls featuring Victoria (Liza Goddard). In the 1970s, Brady and Bingham wrote episodes for the TV series Play for Today, Three Comedies of Marriage, Yes, Honestly and Robin's Nest. During the 1980s and 1990s, they continued to write for the occasional TV series and adapted Jilly Cooper's novel Riders for the television film Riders (1993).

Bingham later commented that by the 1970s, writing for television was highly paid. In Britain, £1,000 was a typical payment for a television script, about ten times as much as the advance for a novel,