Dick Sharples: Award-winning scriptwriter who was best known for the hit sitcoms ‘In Loving Memory’ and ‘Hallelujah!’

Overhearing a conversation in a pub between two undertakers gave Dick Sharples the idea for a sitcom about the business of death, but in 1969 that was still a taboo subject for comedy. The pilot, In Loving Memory, was the third most-watched programme of the year, ahead of Coronation Street, and Thames Television commissioned a series – but cancelled it on hearing that the BBC was launching a similar comedy, That’s Your Funeral.

Ten years later, In Loving Memory was given new life by another ITV company, Yorkshire. The premise remained the same, undertaker’s widow Ivy Unsworth taking over the business with her gormless nephew in the fictional north of England town of Oldshaw, but Marjorie Rhodes was replaced in the starring role by Thora Hird while Christopher Beeny remained as the nephew, Billy Henshaw.

Sharples started their daily mishaps in 1929, a time when funeral parlours were tackling the switch from horse-drawn carriages to motor vehicles, and In Loving Memory ran for five series (1979-86). It was later re-made for Belgian television as RIP (1992-94).

A couple of years into the original’s run, Sharples created and wrote another sitcom for Thora Hird. In Hallelujah! (1983-84), she played a fire-and-brimstone Salvation Army captain, Emily Ridley, running the Paradise Street Citadel in the Yorkshire town of Brigthorpe, resisting advice from fellow officers to retire – but totally failing in her quest to save sinners. The programme won Sharples a Pye Television Comedy Writing Award.

The writer brought to these sitcoms his Northern roots. He was born in Manchester, the second of four sons, to Ernest, a sales rep for the Lyons tea company, and his wife, Frances (née Milne), a former sales rep. Leaving Manchester Grammar School at 15 with a love of drawing and writing, Sharples joined an advertising agency in the city and attended evening art classes at Manchester College of Art.

After national service in Malta with the Navy (1945-47), when he played the drums in a swing band, he joined another Manchester advertising agency. A local printer commissioned him to write his first book, the Western novella The Man Who Rode by Night (1949). Told by his publisher that the market was looking for racier fare (“sex is in”), he turned out a second book, Those Without Shame, under the pseudonym Marcel le Grand, which was promptly banned.

He joined a London advertising agency as a copywriter and freelanced as a cartoonist for various publications under the name Stefan Ricardo. The men’s magazine Clubman included a series titled “Stefan Ricardo at…”, with one cartoon requiring Sharples to stand in the wings of London’s Windmill Theatre sketching the strippers.

With the impending launch of ITV in 1955, Clubman’s deputy editor, Gerald Kelsey, suggested to Sharples that they try their hand at writing for television. Their first script was shown in-house to staff as an example of a programme that could be made on a shoestring – imperative after the commercial companies had paid so much for their licences. The pair created the children’s adventure serial Steve Hunter, Trouble Merchant (1955).

Then came two series of Joan and Leslie (1956-58), an expanded, half-hour version of the channel’s first home-grown sitcom, Leslie Randall Entertains (1955). It had started with 15-minute episodes starring real-life couple Leslie Randall and Joan Reynolds as the journalist who writes an agony-aunt column under the name Dorothy Goodheart and his dutiful, out-of-work actress wife. There was also a sequel, The Randall Touch (1958), and Randall and Leslie later starred in a poorly received Joan and Leslie remake for Australian television (1969).

Sharples and Kelsey also created the ocean-liner soap All Aboard (1959) and the sitcom For the Love of Mike (1960), starring Michael Medwin as a dance band trumpeter. They scripted episodes of popular drama series such as Deadline Midnight, No Hiding Place (both 1960), Ghost Squad (1961 and 1963) and The Saint (1962).

When the partnership came to an end, Sharples contributed scripts to Dixon of Dock Green (1964), Doctor Finlay’s Casebook (1965-69), Z Cars (1967-68) and the fantasy series Adam Adamant Lives! (1967) as well as sitcoms Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width (1971) and A Little Bit of Wisdom (of which he was script editor, 1974-75), with Norman Wisdom.

In between these, he established himself in soap opera. He wrote some 1965 episodes of the magazine-office serial Compact, then was drafted in with Max Marquis (1966-67) to shake up the football saga United! less than a year after its launch. They began by killing off many of the characters in a club coach crash.

After Sharples wrote for two other serials, The Doctors (1969-71) and its spin-off, Owen MD (1972), he and Marquis were paired together again to devise and script-edit General Hospital (1972-80).

Sharples returned to sitcoms with In Loving Memory and Hallelujah! His 1980 pilot Where There’s Brass became the series Thicker Than Water (1981), a comedy with music starring Joss Ackland as widower Joseph Lockwood living with his bachelor sons Alan and Malcolm (Colin Farrell and Peter Denyer), who played in a dance band.

He also revived the family of petty crooks he featured in a two-part 1967 Z Cars story for The Nesbitts Are Coming (1980), starring Clive Swift and Maggie Jones as the parents. However, their confrontations with the officers of the Viaduct police station on a previously peaceful patch failed to catch on.

Sharples’ final sitcom was Farrington of the FO (1986-87), starring Angela Thorne. To research it, he flew to Barcelona to meet the only female British consul general and her staff. He also scripted the 1980 film version of the sitcom George and Mildred.

After TV commissions dried up, Sharples – who died of heart failure – wrote the novels Soap in the Afternoon (1990), A Year in Muswell Hill (a parody of A Year in Provence, under the pen-name Pierre LaPoste, 2003), Getting Even: The Biggest Heist in History (2007), Village in Aspic (2012) and Idunno Jenkins and the River of No Return (2012). His memoir, I Found the Time, was published in 2012. He was a founder member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain in 1959.

ANTHONY HAYWARD

Richard Milne Sharples, television scriptwriter and author: born Manchester 7 June 1927; married 1960 Kristina Kwiatowska (died 2009; one daughter, one son), partner to Marcia Saunders; died London 19 October 2015.