Richard Harris (television writer)

Richard Harris
Born	1934 (age 82–83) London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Screenwriter, playwright

Richard Harris (born 1934) is a prolific British television writer, most active from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. He writes primarily for the crime and detective genres, having contributed episodes of series like The Avengers, The Saint, The Sweeney, Armchair Mystery Theatre, and Target. He has helped to create several standout programmes of the genre, including Adam Adamant Lives!,Man in a Suitcase, and Shoestring. Despite a career which has been largely spent writing for the crime and detective genre, in 1994 he won the prize for best situation comedy from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain for Outside Edge, a programme he had originated as a stage play. Indeed, though the majority of his work has been for television, a substantial amount of his output has been for the stage.

Harris began writing freelance episodes for British television in his mid-twenties. His first sale was to Sydney Newman's 1960 ITV series, Police Surgeon, for which he wrote the final episode, "The Bigger They Are". Though he wrote for the initial runs of The Avengers and The Saint, much of the early 1960s was dominated by his contributions to anthological mystery programmes like The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre and situation comedies like Hancock. His attempts at comedies in the early 1960s were largely collaborative efforts with Dennis Spooner. These joint efforts did not establish either writer in the comedy genre, Instead, as their two failed pilots for Comedy Playhouse proved, the duo were really more interested in writing dramatic works. Despite his commercial failures with Spooner, he continued to collaborate with others during his early career—perhaps most successfully in 1966's Adam Adamant Returns!, whose pilot he wrote with Donald Cotton. By the end of the decade, he had contributed individual episodes to no less than twenty series.

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