Television writer

Born: July 9, 1920;

Died: November 22, 2015

HAZEL Adair, who has died aged 95, was a pioneer of British television soap operas. She introduced black and homosexual characters into stories she wrote for such series as Emergency – Ward 10 and Crossroads, which she dreamed up in a single bank holiday weekend with her writing partner Peter Ling.

By the following Tuesday, ITV boss Lew Grade had commissioned it and it was on air within weeks. Despite a limited budget and rickety sets, Crossroads ran for 24 years from 1964 to 1988 and was revived in 2001.

Adair was also the co-creator of British television’s first daily soap Sixpenny Corner, which focused on a young couple who ran a garage. It went out in 15-minute instalments when ITV started in 1955. She scripted one of television’s first inter-racial kisses, for Emergency – Ward 10 in 1964, four years before Kirk and Uhura’s famous embrace on Star Trek.

Another of her soaps, Compact (1962-65), broke new ground with a black character and an unmarried mother among its regulars. But Adair always maintained that there was no political agenda behind her storylines or characters. “It was natural, true to life,” she said.

And she had seen her share of life before becoming a writer in her thirties. She was born Hazel Joyce Willett in 1920 in Darjeeling in India, where her father was a railway engineer. Her parents divorced and she grew up in England.

As a teenager she drove ambulances in the Blitz. During the Second World War she also met and married a rancher who had come over from Brazil to join the Army. He returned to South America after the war, while she stayed in England with their son (journalist Colin Mackenzie, who tracked down the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Brazil in 1974).

Pursuing an acting career, she adopted the name Adair in the hope that it would propel her up the credits. She worked mainly in theatre, with occasional small film and television roles.

“I didn’t think of writing in those days although I did have a lively imagination,” she said. “Being an only child and being left alone I used to make up stories for my own pleasure.” She heard there was a shortage of scriptwriters in the new and developing medium of television and decided to give it a go. “Within three months I had seven programmes,” she said.

One of her earliest was the children’s adventure Stranger from Space, a feature of the Whirligig programme in the early 1950s. She co-wrote it with her second husband Ronald Marriott, who became a noted television director and producer and directed Sixpenny Corner.

Adair also wrote for the long-running radio soap Mrs Dale’s Diary, where fellow writers included Jonquil Antony, with whom she created Sixpenny Corner, and Peter Ling, with whom she created both Compact and Crossroads.

Crossroads happened because Lew Grade wanted a daily soap and it had to star Noele Gordon in the principal role. Adair and Ling came up with the idea of a widow who turns her large mansion into a motel when a motorway is built across her land. And so Crossroads was born.

Adair had two more sons, both given names beginning with C because she had won money on horses with names beginning with C. She also adopted three girls, all sisters. With five teenagers in the house at once, she would get up at 5am to write scripts, which she did in longhand. She never used a typewriter or computer.

Writing financed a comfortable lifestyle. She had a 14-room mansion and swimming pool in Surrey. She even owned racing horses, but never enjoyed much success with her own animals.

After the death of her second husband in 1972, she took her career in a new direction, writing, producing and sometimes financing low-budget movies aimed at exploiting the relaxation of film censorship and rules on sex and nudity. She set up a film company with Kent Walton, best known as a wrestling commentator.

Her films included Virgin Witch (1972), with Vicki Michelle, and the sex comedies Can You Keep It Up for a Week? (1975), which, as the title suggests, was about a man who has to hold down a job for seven days, and Keep It Up Downstairs (1976), with Diana Dors and William Rushton. Adair used various pseudonyms to keep her film work separate from her television job.

As well as the low-budget sex comedies, she also produced the 1979 African adventure film Game for Vultures with Richard Harris, Joan Collins, Richard Roundtree and Ray Milland, and she worked as second unit director on it too.

A lively individual, avid television viewer and Corrie fan in her retirement, she is survived by her three sons, three adopted daughters, 11 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

BRIAN PENDREIGH