Clive Exton

Clive Exton (11 April 1930 – 16 August 2007) was a British television and film screenwriter who wrote scripts for the series Poirot, Jeeves and Wooster and Rosemary & Thyme.

Early career He was born Clive Jack Montague Brooks in Islington, London, England, the son of a civil service clerk. He spent two years in the British Army, stationed in Germany. Most of this early work is now lost, having been made at a time when programmes recorded on tape were routinely wiped and telerecordings discarded. However, Exton also wrote Stigma, the 1977 episode of the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas, and ITV Playhouse's 1979 adaptation of M. R. James's Casting the Runes, both of which survive.

Exton then moved away from the single play and initiated series such as Killers, Conceptions of Murder and The Crezz, a depiction of Notting Hill life in the 1970s. He also contributed, under the pen name M. K. Jeeves, two episodes to the first season of Terry Nation's Survivors for the BBC.

Exton said that the only feature film he ever wrote that pleased him was 10 Rillington Place, with Sir Richard Attenborough (1971). Other films include Night Must Fall, The House in Nightmare Park, Isadora (with Melvyn Bragg and starring Vanessa Redgrave) and Entertaining Mr Sloane (from the Joe Orton play). He worked without credit on many films, but it is now known that he made major contributions to the scripts of Georgy Girl and The Bounty.

He also dramatised for television works by Jean Cocteau, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon and H. G. Wells.

He was married twice, first to Patricia Fletcher Ferguson (1951–1957), with whom he had two daughters (Ghislaine Frances Crerar Metcalfe and Sara Charlotte Montague-Brooks), and then from 1957 until his death to Margaret "Mara" Reid, with whom he had three children, two daughters (Antigone Margaret Exton White and Cornelia Plaxy Locatelli) and a son (Saul Alexander).

Exton died in London of brain cancer on 16 August 2007. His ashes are buried on the east side of Highgate Cemetery.

Exton wrote only sporadically for the theatre: Have You Any Dirty Washing, Mother Dear? (1970) Twixt (1990), Dressing Down (1995) Barking in Essex (2005)

Barking in Essex made its West End début in September 2013 and starred Lee Evans, Sheila Hancock and Keeley Hawes.