Clive Exton, the television playwright and scriptwriter who has died aged 77, won fame with his highly individual mixture of black comedy and oblique social criticism. Focused around six early plays on ABC Television's Armchair Theatre series, his work was, with some justification in the early 1960s, regarded as ahead of its time. The irony of his career was that by the time nasty happenings had become commonplace on television, he had gravitated towards more mellow mainstream scripts. There were, for example, 20 episodes of Poirot (1989-2001), 23 episodes of Jeeves and Wooster (1990-93) - for which he won the 1992 Writers' Guild award for best dramatised series - and 10 episodes of Rosemary & Thyme (2003-06).
Although it was not Exton's first television play, The Trial of Dr Fancy, written in 1962 but not seen until 1964 on Armchair Theatre, created controversy about the alleged timorous censorship by commercial television companies, which were still feeling their way. Exton, who was under contract to ABC, had the keeper of a private nursing home on trial for murder after a patient died when a doctor amputated both his legs for no medical reason.
At the trial it was revealed that Dr Fancy had done many such amputations at the request of patients: they were so worried about what they regarded as their excessive height that they were prepared to have their legs amputated as a way of "fitting in". Exton, who was 6ft 4in tall - and knew this was not always an advantage in his previous career as an actor - had created a satire about the insidious power of conformity.
ABC was content to pay the then handsome £8,000 cost of the production, and sit back for two years while executives argued whether the play was valid social comment or just gratuitously "sick". After much press comment, there was some suggestion that the BBC might step in, buy the recording and screen it. But the BBC had had its own troubles with the satirical That Was The Week That Was programme, and was in a cautious phase of its own.
In 1964, ABC's programme controller Brian Tesler said, "We believe that the climate of opinion concerning black comedy has changed in the past two years. When the play was recorded, we felt that many people might fail to appreciate the compassion which underlies the irony in Mr Exton's play." But sufficient of the public, he thought, were now familiar enough with the conventions of black comedy to understand the playwright's meaning.
At around the same time, it was revealed that another play of Exton's, The Big Eat, had also been recorded by ABC and not broadcast. This was a satire on the phoney matiness of those trying to create a consumer society with all methods of communication, including television tunes and jingles. It had also been commissioned by ABC's head of drama, the radical Sydney Newman, who was determined to break the stranglehold of what he saw as over-prissy television drama, a move regarded with suspicion by other executives.
The Big Eat was too much for any commercial company easily to swallow. But, like The Trial of Dr Fancy, it did advance Exton's reputation as a writer of raw danger when the BBC finally screened it in 1965. By 1969, he had had more than a dozen plays televised, and had worked on the screenplay of Karel Reisz's Isadora (1968) with Melvyn Bragg and Margaret Drabble. He had also embarked on a stage play, Have You Any Dirty Washing, Mother Dear?, a satire on parliamentary procedure put on at the Hampstead Theatre Club before Anglia Television screened it.
The son of a civil servant, Exton was born in Islington, north London, and won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, where he achieved a reputation for irreverence by throwing a piece of margarine which missed its target and defaced a valuable painting by Antonio Verrio. Leaving at 16, he took a job in an advertising agency and did his national service in the British Army of the Rhine, where he began acting.
Back in London, he trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Taking his professional name from Piers of Exton in Richard II, he appeared with touring companies from 1951 to 1958. He was a self-confessedly mediocre performer, who increasingly resented having to say lines by other playwrights which he thought to be even more mediocre than his acting. He worked in a tile factory, a dog biscuit factory and several coffee bars, and was a stage manager at the New Theatre in 1956 for Peter Hall's production of Gigi. Convinced he could do better, he decided to try writing a television play.
The result was No Fixed Abode (1959), which was social commentary in a more directly human mode than his subsequent satires. It was popular, and encouraged him to experiment. ABC gave him a two-year contract for one-hour plays at £800 a time, then the top going rate.
Exton's later work was an eclectic mixture, with surreal blackness no longer necessarily playing a central part, though it helped him with the series Conceptions of Murder (1970), Killers (1976) and The Crezz (1977). In 1975 he worked with Tom Stoppard on the Mike Newell-directed The Boundary. His film scripting career took in such films as Night Must Fall (1964), Emlyn Williams's chilling thriller about a roving psychopath; Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane (1969); 10 Rillington Place (1971), directed by Richard Fleischer (obituary, March 28 2006) with Richard Attenborough as the Notting Hill serial killer John Christie; The House in Nightmare Park (1973) - which featured Frankie Howerd and Ray Milland - and Red Sonja (1985). The latter film, again directed by Fleischer, gave Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen the chance to work out on Exton's prose.
For television, he dramatised Graham Greene in Shades of Greene (1975), wrote scripts for the series Dick Barton: Special Agent (1979), helped translate Ruth Rendell's eye for the quietly menacing in Wolf To the Slaughter (1987) and wrote for the television mini-series The Infinite Worlds of HG Wells (2001). The list of distinguished authors whose works he had dramatised included Jean Cocteau, Daphne du Maurier, Somerset Maugham and Georges Simenon.
In the theatre, Exton wrote the new book for the PG Wodehouse original for a musical based on Damsels in Distress, a new stage comedy Twixt, which premiered in Paris in 1996 and played in Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Milan, Rome, Naples and Florence. He also adapted Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy for a Duke of York Theatre production. Productions of his own plays, Neddy and Bumps, and Barking In Essex, were being planned at the time of his death.
In 1951 Exton married Patricia Fletcher Ferguson, with whom he had two daughters. They were divorced in 1957, the same year he married Margaret (Mara) White, whom he had met while they were both appearing in the farce Reluctant Heroes. They had two daughters and a son.
· Clive Exton (Clive Jack Montague Brooks), scriptwriter and playwright, born April 11 1930; died August 16 2007
· The article above was amended on Saturday August 25 2007. We omitted the surname of Clive Exton's first wife. Her full maiden name was Patricia Fletcher Ferguson. We also confused the order of Mr Exton's names; they are Clive Jack Montague Brooks. These changes have been made.