The writer Roy Minton, who has died aged 90, was every bit as radical and uncompromising a television talent as Alan Clarke, the director with whom he forged a long-time partnership. Most famously, they made the banned 1977 television play Scum, brutal in its account of violence inside a borstal – as exercised by both inmates and warders.
Minton wrote the part of Carlin, who quickly establishes himself as the “daddy” among the young offenders, as a Glaswegian. But Ray Winstone, an east Londoner fresh from being expelled from drama school, landed the role after walking into the auditions and impressing Clarke with his cocky, aggressive walk.
Bill Cotton, BBC One’s controller, cancelled Scum’s screening after viewing its violent scenes, which included a male rape (leading to the victim’s suicide) and rioting, as well as Winstone depositing snooker balls inside a sock and using this improvised cosh to clobber a fellow inmate over the head.
Minton acknowledged that Scum was “hard, violent and disturbing”, but insisted that it was based on real incidents he was told about in interviews with almost 100 people – boys, staff, parents and a governor – and added: “Research was a painful – excruciatingly painful – experience for me.” Alasdair Milne, the BBC’s director of programmes, claimed that the sheer extent of the violence in a 90-minute production “distorted” borstal life.
With the rights reverting to Minton, Clarke remade it as a 1979 feature film. It formed part of the movement that led to the abolition of borstals in 1982. The original TV version was finally screened by the BBC in 1991. Scum, in both its television and film versions, remains a powerful indictment of a flawed British institution.
The Minton-Clarke working relationship began when Minton’s agent put them in touch. Clarke had started directing short plays for ITV and introduced Minton to Rediffusion’s head of scripted series, Stella Richman. She accepted two of his submissions, with Clarke directing The Gentleman Caller (1967), about two layabouts confronted by a DHSS official (played by George Cole), and Goodnight Albert (1968), on a miner living with his grandmother (as Minton himself did from the age of 13).
“We had the same background – working class, him Liverpool and me Nottingham – and we were of the same age,” Minton told Clarke’s biographer, Richard T Kelly. “And we had both got under the net into grammar school.” Both also had early work experience in mining – Minton for coal and Clarke for gold (in Canada).
Paul Knight, the associate producer of the Half Hour Story series, recalled Minton as “a conscience” whose working-class background and anti-establishment attitude contrasted with his own suburban upbringing. He also credited the writer with being an influence on the director.
Minton and Clarke became firm friends and practical jokers – wearing wartime gas masks on Tube trains.
The pair collaborated again on Stand By Your Screen (1968), an ITV family drama about a son revolting against his parents’ suburban conformity.
Then came the BBC drama Horace (1972), about a diabetic man with learning disabilities working in a joke shop and befriending a schoolboy retreating from a loveless home into an imaginary world. He based the lead character on someone he had known in his home town of Nottingham and the story was typical of how Minton and Clarke were keen to represent despised and neglected members of society. Minton turned this single play into a six-part comedy-drama series for ITV in 1982, although with James Cellan Jones directing.
For Clarke, at the BBC, he also wrote Funny Farm (1975), a Play for Today attacking the conditions for staff and patients on a psychiatric ward (“Psychiatric therapy is fundamentally an agent for the state,” he told Radio Times); and Fast Hands (1976), a Plays for Britain production telling the story of a young boxer exploited by a Mercedes-driving promoter.
But Minton fell out with Clarke over the Scum remake, particularly the omission of a scene from the TV version where Carlin broaches a gay relationship with another inmate. “Carlin wasn’t homosexual,” explained Minton. “I met a career criminal who had been through borstal and prison. He told me about these cavortings, very much on a public school basis – how he would have a ‘missus’ inside … just for the time inside. It extended Carlin’s character quite a lot for me.”
The writer’s screen career ended after he dissociated himself from Scrubbers, his 1982 female version of Scum, about two girls escaping from an open borstal, directed by Mai Zetterling. He said his screenplay had been “savaged”.
Minton was born Roy Davies in Nottingham, the eldest of 13 children, to Eliza (nee Crawford) and Harold Davies, a cabinet machinist. Roy worked as a miner, clerk, waiter, stoker and building labourer, then won a scholarship to train as an actor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
Taking the professional name Minton, he had small roles on TV in Coronation Street (as a police officer, 1963) and as a scaffolder in The Lump (1967), Jim Allen’s Wednesday Play.
After being awarded a BBC writer’s bursary in 1968, Minton scripted the radio play The Gold Medallist and became resident writer at Nottingham Playhouse. Following his early ITV plays, he had his black comedy Sometime Never performed at the Fortune theatre, London (1969).
Then came his own Wednesday Plays as a writer, Sling Your Hook (1969), about a Nottinghamshire miners’ charabanc to Blackpool, and The Hunting of Lionel Crane (1970), the story of an army deserter.
They drew large audiences, but Irene Shubik, the producer who commissioned both, said their association came to an end after his unwillingness to listen to requests for rewrites and Minton’s letters complaining that “his work had not been properly served” by her and Michael Tuchner, who directed the dramas.
Minton is survived by his partner, Jeannette Saintflour, and by two sons, Lawrence and Thomas, from his 1981 marriage to Nicole Thrower, which ended in divorce.
• Roy Minton (Roy Davies), writer, born 28 August 1933; died 17 August 2024
• This article was amended on 26 August 2024. The original television version of Scum was broadcast in 1991 by the BBC, not by Channel 4 as an earlier version said. C4 broadcast the film version as part of its Banned strand that year.
