Brian Finch

James Brian Finch, writer: born Wigan, Lancashire 25 July 1936; married 1963 Margaret Moran (one son, three daughters); died Wigan 27 June 2007.

For two decades, Brian Finch was one of Coronation Street's most prolific scriptwriters, contributing 151 episodes to the much-admired series set in a northern back street. Elsie Tanner, Ena Sharples, Annie Walker, Albert Tatlock, Ken Barlow and Hilda Ogden were all well-established national icons on his arrival, but Finch was one of those who breathed new life into the serial as new characters such as Bet Lynch, Deirdre Barlow, Mike Baldwin, Ivy Tilsley and Jack and Vera Duckworth became familiar.

During the years that Finch worked on the Street, the launch of EastEnders as a soap-opera competitor and the battle for ratings meant that the boundaries of high drama shifted. Having written the 1977 episode in which Rita Littlewood (Barbara Knox) married Len Fairclough (Peter Adamson), Finch's final episodes for the Granada serial 12 years later had the widowed Rita being defrauded by her lover Alan Bradley (Mark Eden), who used the deeds on her house to raise money to set up his own burglar-alarm business. This led to one of the Street's most explosive story-lines, with Alan trying to murder Rita when she discovered his deception and, finally, his death under a Blackpool tram.

Finch was a much valued member of the scriptwriting team. "Brian had a habit in story-line meetings of saying, 'I think we are missing a trick here'," recalled the veteran Coronation Street writer John Stevenson.

And sometimes he added, "Or possibly three." Then, he would elaborate on his idea. Another word he would use was "jeopardy", meaning who stands to get carved up. He was always looking for ways to "step up the jeopardy".

After leaving Coronation Street in 1989, Finch continued to write prolifically but gained his greatest success with a one-off script, fulfilling a long-time ambition to adapt Michelle Magorian's children's novel Goodnight Mister Tom for television (1998). The gentle, wartime story of a widower, Tom Oakley (played by a bushy-bearded John Thaw) who builds up a friendship with an evacuee boy billeted in his home, was so publicly and critically acclaimed that it was shown again within three months and repeated a total of six times on ITV. It also won Bafta's Lew Grade Award and the Television and Radio Industries Club Award as ITV Programme of the Year (both 1999).

Born in Wigan, Lancashire, in 1936, the son of a miner, Finch attended St Joseph's School in the town, where the music-hall comedian George Formby had previously been a pupil, and Thornleigh College, Bolton, before joining the Bolton Evening News as a junior reporter at the age of 15.

While doing National Service with the RAF in Paris, he wrote articles for the troops, and after demob found a job on the Manchester Evening News, then switched to the northern edition of TV Times, based in Manchester, where his assignments included ghost-writing articles for The Beatles.

Finch then worked as a BBC press officer, both in Manchester and London, and his submission of a play to the drama department led to his first screened work. Rodney, Our Intrepid Hero (1966), about a Sunday newspaper reporter on the trail of a vice ring, was broadcast in the prestigious Wednesday Play slot and starred Jim Norton in his first television role.

The journalist's scriptwriting career might have ended there had it not been for a call he made several years later to Granada Television accidentally being put through to the writer Jack Rosenthal, who was then working on Coronation Street and invited Finch to try his hand. After becoming a full-time writer for television, he also contributed scripts to the daytime serial Harriet's Back in Town (1973), the medical drama Owen MD (1973), the crime series Public Eye (1973, 1975), Hunter's Walk (1976) and Strangers (1978), the sitcoms The Life of Riley (1975) and The Squirrels (1976-77), the family haulage business drama The Brothers (1976) and the children's series The Tomorrow People (1973) and Potter's Picture Palace (1976, 1978).

On his own, Finch wrote the Thirty-Minute Theatre production An Arrow for Little Audrey (1972), the six-part children's thriller The Chinese Puzzle (1974) and the peak-time drama serial Fallen Hero (1978-79), about a Welsh Rugby Union player going north to switch to a more lucrative career in rugby league (Finch himself was a lifelong fan of the rugby league club Wigan Warriors).

From 1978 to 1989, he also wrote many episodes of All Creatures Great and Small, the popular BBC drama series starring Christopher Timothy and based on James Herriot's books about a country vet in North Yorkshire, leaving just a year before its final run.

He and Johnny Byrne were the programme's most regular writers and it seemed a short step for both of them to take on the same mantle for Heartbeat, ITV's adaptations of Nicholas Rhea's Constable novels about a village policeman in the Sixties in the North Riding of Yorkshire. They joined it from its first series, in 1992, and Finch stayed for 14 years, soon setting the tone for the occasional "disasters" visited on the fictional village of Aidensfield, with one of his early episodes involving a train crash in a snowstorm. His final episode of the drama was broadcast last December.

During these years, the versatile Finch also contributed to the crime series Juliet Bravo (1980-82), Bergerac (1984-90), The Bill (1989-90) and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1997-8), and wrote the BBC play Good as Gold (about a talented 14-year-old schoolgirl swimmer, 1986). He also created and wrote the football drama serial Murphy's Mob (1981-85) for children's television and the gentle comedy-drama Flying Lady (1987, 1989), starring Frank Windsor as Harry Bradley, who blows his redundancy money on a Rolls-Royce.

With other writers, Finch adapted another Magorian novel for television, Back Home (2001), with Sarah Lancashire as a newly independent woman finding problems adapting to family life after wartime work, and Goodbye, Mr Chips (2002), starring Martin Clunes as the popular teacher.

On his own, he wrote the screenplays of Heidi (for the cinema, starring Max von Sydow and Diana Rigg, 2005) and the television film The Shell Seekers (with Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell, 2006).

Anthony Hayward