Don Webb, who has died aged 89 after suffering from prostate cancer, was an avid reader of crime novels as a child, particularly enamoured of Philip Marlowe, the private eye created by Raymond Chandler. So it was no surprise that he was enthusiastic about writing scripts for the 1980s TV police dramas Juliet Bravo and Rockliffe’s Babies.
“The basics never really change,” he wrote in the Daily Mirror in 1995. “A crime is committed, someone solves it and the baddie is locked away.” But Webb also enjoyed writing about the lives of the people behind the crimebusters, explaining: “You have the good cops and bad cops, cops who fall in love with their female colleagues.”
In a groundbreaking departure from the norm, a woman was the top cop in Juliet Bravo, which began in 1980 with Stephanie Turner as Inspector Jean Darblay investigating crimes – and facing sexism from male officers – in a parochial Lancashire town. The series was created by Ian Kennedy Martin, and was in stark contrast to his earlier, tougher London police drama The Sweeney, although both were ratings winners.
Halfway through the six-series run of Juliet Bravo, Turner left and Anna Carteret took centre-stage as Inspector Kate Longton. Webb joined the scriptwriting team for the last two series (1984-85) and helped Juliet Bravo to attract one of its biggest audiences, more than 14 million, with the story of a prisoner dying in hospital after collapsing in a police cell.
He was also entrusted with the programme’s final episode, which shocked viewers with the death of a popular young officer in a nightclub set ablaze.
Webb went on to script Rockliffe’s Babies (1987-88), starring Ian Hogg as the boss of rookie constables in a Metropolitan Police crime squad, and the feature-length drama Ellington (1994), a vehicle for Christopher Ellison, as an honest sports promoter surrounded by crooks, on a break from his role as the no-nonsense Detective Chief Inspector Frank Burnside in The Bill. Webb wrote for that police drama, too, from 1998 to 1999.
He came to full-time writing late, in his mid-40s, after working as a sales rep. His most dramatic stage play, Mindrape (1981), drew on his experience as one of the servicemen used as guinea pigs at Porton Down, the MoD’s chemical warfare research establishment in Wiltshire. In 1953, when he was an 18-year-old doing national service with the RAF, scientists – carrying out mind-control tests for MI6 – told him to take the psychedelic drug LSD several times in a week.
“I hallucinated for a hell of a long time,” he told the Guardian in 2002. He recalled “walls melting, cracks appearing in people’s faces – you could see their skulls, eyes would run down cheeks, Salvador Dalí-type faces, all in broad daylight”, and added: “A flower would turn into a slug. You could see things growing on you.” Four years later, he received compensation.
Mindrape, one of Webb’s plays as writer-in-residence at the Crucible theatre, Sheffield, starred Sue Holderness as a scientist carrying out such experiments. Retitled Mindkill, it transferred to Greenwich theatre, London, in 1982 with Diana Quick as the lead character.
Webb was born in Bootle, Merseyside, to Eira (nee Kelley) and Walter Webb, a paper mill employee. He attended Birkenhead school and, after a job at Unilever and national service, he worked in personnel and sales roles, and was made redundant twice. In his spare time, he acted with amateur dramatics groups in Port Sunlight and Chorley.
Turning to writing, he had three plays accepted by BBC Radio Manchester: Centre Circle (1980) focused on bribery and corruption in football; Designing Alternatives (1980) tackled duplicity in the property world; and The Chairman’s Statement: Rationalisation of Resources (1981) was about redundancy, which was topical as well as personal.
His stage successes in Sheffield also included Black Ball Game (1980), a comedy about racism, and a Cinderella pantomime starring the comedian Bobby Knutt (1981-82).
Business and industry, drawing on his own experiences, continued to feature in his works. Ladybird, a comedy about an executive with money worries – again reflecting despair in the early years of the Thatcher government – premiered at the Liverpool Everyman studio in 1982 and was later performed on a 1988 tour, with Karl Howman and Diane Keen starring.
Webb, who said his plays were “political with a small ‘p’”, confronted Northern Ireland’s Troubles in The Best Girl in Ten Streets, staged in London in 1982 at the Soho Poly, then at the National Theatre.
He contributed his first television scripts to the children’s series Radio Phoenix (1982), about a commercial radio station. Later came the feature-length drama Edge of the Wind (1985), starring John Mills as a retired major-general and Omar Sharif as his disrespectful servant, before Webb created the sitcom Joint Account (1989-90), starring Hannah Gordon as a bank manager and Peter Egan as her stay-at-home husband.
Returning to children’s TV, he wrote 1990 and 1992 episodes of the youth club drama Byker Grove and in 1995 adapted Alan Garner’s fantasy novel Elidor in six parts.
In 1960, Webb married Hilary Pearson; they divorced in 1975. His second wife, Lynn (nee Turner), an actor, whom he married in 1979, died in 2007. He is survived by the children of his first marriage, Catherine and Mark, his stepchildren, Jill and Mark, and his brother, Colin.
• Donald Edward Webb, writer, born 10 October 1934; died 26 May 2024
