Nick Dando

I see from the Guardian website that Johnny Byrne has died at the age of 72. Many will remember his work on All Creatures Great and Small.

Obituary: Johnny Byrne | Media | The Guardian

With its graphic descriptions of the rock lifestyle of the 1960s, the bestseller, Groupie, written in 1969 by Johnny Byrne and Jenny Fabian, was, briefly, a London media succès de scandale. Yet within a decade, Byrne, who has died aged 72, was well set on the path which, through various twists and turns, sealed his reputation as a reliable source of comforting Sunday evening television. He wrote 29 episodes of All Creatures Great and Small (1977-90) and, from 1992, 23 episodes of Heartbeat.

Byrne started life in a tenement in Dublin's Northside, the eldest of 13 children born to working-class parents. Arriving in Britain in 1956, he cut down Christmas trees in the Lake District, worked on the Liverpool docks and was a guide on the river Thames in Oxford, before teaching English as a foreign language around European capitals.

By the 1960s, he was a tour manager for the American Shel Talmy, who was record producer for the Who and the Kinks - and Byrne's agent. The Irishman began writing poetry and edited several small-circulation magazines. His short stories appeared in the British magazine Science Fantasy (renamed Impulse in 1966). One of his stories was selected by leading Canadian critic Judith Merrill, for her The Best of Science Fiction 1965-1966. Byrne also featured at the Edinburgh festival and at underground happenings, as part of the Poisoned Bellows, alongside poet Spike Hawkins.

Then came Groupie and, in 1970, Byrne's first TV script, for one of the last BBC Wednesday Plays. Made on film, Season of the Witch starred Robert Powell, Paul Nicholas and singer Julie Driscoll as dope-smoking exponents of the counterculture. The early 1970s found Byrne living in a commune, and contributing scripts to Thames TV's children's series Pipkins.

In 1972 came the first of Byrne's two excursions into film, adapting Spike Milligan's book Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall. Jim Dale was an annoyingly chirpy Spike; the genuine article had a cameo, as his own father. The other, To Die For (1994), was once described as a gay version of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and not to be confused with Gus Van Sant's film of the same name.

In his 1960s science fiction, Byrne had dealt with mature themes, but he found that in TV the genre was categorised as juvenilia. He was script editor on the first series of Space 1999 (1975-76), for which he also wrote 11 episodes. Regretting increased American involvement, he observed: "Over-produced series have the smack of death when they finally fetch up on our screens."

From 1981 to 1984, he wrote three Doctor Who stories, including Tom Baker's penultimate performance, and two 1980s ITV series, the daytime drama Miracles Take Longer and the children's series Dodger, Bonzo and the Rest.

Following the initial All Creatures Great and Small, he contributed to the BBC's One By One (1985), a similar series about a trainee vet, then returned, as script consultant, for All Creatures' late 80s revival. Noah's Ark (1997-98), created by him in the Heartbeat mould and starring Anton Rodgers, was less successful. He had a keen interest in Celtic mythology, incorporating themes and character names into sci-fi scripts. He also lectured on former Yugoslavia.

His wife Sandy, whom he married in 1975, and their sons Jasper, Barnaby and Nicholas, survive him.

· John Christopher (Johnny) Byrne, writer, born November 27 1935; died April 2 2008

Nick

Lord Brett

We're running a previously unpublished interview with the late Mr Byrne in the next issue of the Gerry Anderson Fan Club magazine FAB, due out in July, as he was the script edior on Space: 1999.

smudge

Sad news. I always rather enjoyed SPACE 1999. Didn't tune into ALL CREATURES very often though. Johnny Byrne was always very good in interviews, it struck me.

RIP

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

julian_craster

Obituary: Johnny Byrne: Writer of feelgood TV dramas

INDEPENDENT
Monday, 12 May 2008

Johnny Byrne was a hugely prolific and successful writer for British television, but the Dublin tenement where he grew up, during the Depression and Second World War, was a thousand miles from the rural backdrops to the popular, feelgood television dramas that made his name. He was the lead writer and, eventually, script consultant on All Creatures Great and Small (1978-90), the long-running series based on James Herriot's semi-autobiographical books about a country vet, and the principal writer on Heartbeat, about a village policeman in North Yorkshire.

All Creatures Great and Small starred Christopher Timothy as James Herriot, the vet who joined Siegfried and Tristan Farnon (Robert Hardy and Peter Davison) in a North Yorkshire practice. Viewers were kept amused by their exploits, dealing with problems from an impotent bull to an exploding cow. In the first episode scripted by Byrne, Herriot met his wife-to-be, Helen Anderson, played by Carol Drinkwater – and the off-screen romance between Timothy and Drinkwater only served to boost audience figures.

The programme's fictional small town of Darrowby was a forerunner to the village of Aidensfield, the setting for Heartbeat, to where Byrne decamped after All Creatures Great and Small had run its course. He was adept at writing scripts with dramatic twists in gentle surroundings, so it was no surprise that in 1992 he was hired as principal writer on Heartbeat, based on Nicholas Rhea's "Constable" novels about a village policemen in the 1960s. He continued with the ratings-topping series until 2005.

Born in Dublin in 1935, the eldest of 13 children, Byrne sailed to Liverpool at the age of 21 where he took a job on the docks, sorting dunnage. He mixed with the port's bohemian community and became involved in the emerging pop culture, organising poetry and jazz sessions that gave opportunities to poets such as Brian Patten and Roger McGough.

Byrne went through a string of jobs, as a Christmas tree-feller, an electrician's mate, a manager for ecclesiastical suppliers, and a teacher of English as a foreign language in London, Paris, Athens and Istanbul. He was also a tour manager for the American record producer Shel Talmy's rock groups, which included The Who and The Kinks, and himself performed as one half of the surreal act the Poisoned Bellows, with the poet Spike Hawkins.

In London, Byrne began writing science-fiction stories for magazines such as Science Fantasy and Impulse. Then, with Jenny Fabian, he wrote the bestselling novel Groupie (1969), whose stories of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll in the Swinging Sixties captured the spirit of the underground culture. "Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne have succeeded in showing what life is like in a world where the extraordinary is commonplace and to be commonplace is a sin," wrote Jonathon Green in Rolling Stone.

This led to Byrne's first television script, Season of the Witch (1970), in the celebrated "Wednesday Play" slot, which starred the singer Julie Driscoll as a woman who drops out of the typing pool in an attempt to find herself. Then came the zany Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall (1972), Byrne, Norman Cohen and Spike Milligan's feature-film version of Milligan's first volume of autobiography, before Byrne returned to science fiction to write episodes of Gerry Anderson's live-action series Space: 1999 (1975-78), of which he was also executive story editor for the first series, and three Doctor Who stories (1981, 1983, 1984).

In the middle of All Creatures Great and Small's run, Byrne became script editor of another BBC veterinarian drama, One by One (based on David Taylor's books and starring Rob Heyland, 1984-87), also writing some episodes. He later created Noah's Ark (1997-98), featuring Anton Rodgers as a country vet, for ITV.

Anthony Hayward

John Christopher Byrne, writer: born Dublin 27 November 1935; married 1975 Sandy Carrington-Mail (three sons); died Norwich 2 April 2008.