David Yallop
Writer who investigated the Vatican and was sacked from Eastenders for planning too many deaths
DAVID YALLOP, who has died aged 81, wrote bestselling, often controversial, books dealing with miscarriages of justice, unsolved crimes and mysteries ranging from the circumstances surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I to dirty dealings at Fifa.
He also wrote television scripts for series such as Minder and Crown Court, and came to public attention in 1992 when he successfully sued the BBC for breach of contract after he had been sacked as a scriptwriter for Eastenders.
He had been hired in April 1989 by the producers of the soap to devise some seductive plot twists in an attempt to oust the ITV rival Coronation Street from the top of the ratings. Given a brief to eliminate 10 members of the cast, he responded by bringing violent death to Albert Square.
In one plot, Diane, the runaway daughter of the bed-and-breakfast landlord Frank Butcher, Wicksy the barman and the market stallholder Pete Beale were to die when an IRA explosives cache ignited under the square’s community centre. Others would succumb to armed robbery, suicide and disease.
Yallop’s carnage went down well with the show’s executive producer, Mike Gibbon. But when he was handed a year’s worth of Yallop plots, the BBC’S head of series, Peter Cregeen, had reservations. Yallop’s ideas were dropped and Gibbon was demoted (he resigned from the show soon afterwards).
Yallop was sacked in November 1989, receiving just £7,500 for 70 days’ work, the BBC later claiming that he had repudiated his contract in a conversation with the new executive producer, Michael Ferguson. In 1992 he won £68,195 damages after a High Court judge ruled that the BBC must pay him for his unused storylines.
Some of Yallop’s books led to miscarriages of justice being overturned and scandals being exposed, though he was probably best known for two books about the papacy that caused outrage among some of the faithful.
In In God’s Name (1984) Yallop, who described himself as a “Catholic agnostic”, claimed on the basis of mostly undocumented evidence that Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978 after only 33 days in office, officially from a heart attack, had been poisoned by a group of Vatican cardinals because of his plans to liberalise Catholic doctrines and his determination to expose their links to the notorious P2 Masonic lodge.
Sales of the book were in no way dented by the Vatican denouncing it as “infamous rubbish”, or by a subsequent book by the historian and journalist John Cornwell, an author generally unsympathetic to the Vatican, which went through Yallop’s claims point by point and demonstrated to the satisfaction of most reviewers that the Pope had died of natural causes. In God’s Name
sold six million copies worldwide and was awarded the Crime Writers’ Gold Dagger Award for the best non-fiction book of 1984.
The Sunday Telegraph’s reviewer, Damian Thompson, likened the experience of reading Yallop’s subsequent assault on the papacy, The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark
Heart of John Paul II’S Vatican (2007) to being “trapped by a bore” at a party: “David Yallop’s tone never varies: it’s Glenda Slagg-style ‘Karol Wojtyla, don’tcha hate him?!!!’ for more than 500 pages.”
David Anthony Yallop was born on January 27 1937 in south London to an Irish mother and English father. Brought up as a Catholic, he served as an altar boy at his local church.
He left school at the age of 14 and got work as a tea boy in a newspaper office. After National Service he became an assistant floor manager, then floor manager, with the television company Associated Rediffusion and later London Weekend Television, where he started writing for television, eventually becoming a full-time writer. He supplied scripts for, among others, David Frost, and comedians such as Charlie Drake, Rolf Harris, Spike Milligan and the Two Ronnies.
His first book, To Encourage the
Others (1971), was the first of many to urge the innocence of Derek Bentley, who had been hanged for his involvement in the murder of a policeman in 1952, starting a campaign that led in 1998 to the Court of Appeal quashing Bentley’s conviction for murder.
His next book, The Day the Laughter
Stopped (1976), was promoted as uncovering “the incredible true story” behind the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle scandal of 1921, when the film comedian stood accused of the rape and murder of Virginia Rappe, a starlet who died of a ruptured bladder a few days after attending a party in Arbuckle’s suite in a San Francisco hotel.
Arbuckle was acquitted in a third trial, but the scandal ruined his career. Yallop exposed flaws in the prosecution case and suggested that Miss Rappe had died as the result of an illegal abortion.
While promoting the book in New Zealand Yallop was asked to look into the case of Arthur Thomas, a farmer sentenced to life for double murder who had already lost two appeals. He became convinced of Thomas’s innocence and his book Beyond
Reasonable Doubt (1978), later adapted into a docudrama starring John Hargreaves and David Hemmings, played a major part in establishing his innocence. In 1978 Thomas was granted a royal pardon after nine years behind bars and was awarded NZ$1 million in compensation.
Deliver Us From Evil (1981) was an investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper case, in which Yallop claimed that seven months before Peter Sutcliffe was arrested, he (Yallop) had told police that their man was 35, with a black beard, a gap in his teeth, a lorry driver living in Bradford, married, with no children, who had already been interviewed by police and eliminated from their enquiries. Sutcliffe answered the description in every respect.
To the Ends of the Earth (1993) told the story of how the notorious 1970s terrorist Carlos the “Jackal”, an overweight, trigger-happy, largely incompetent mercenary, was built up by intelligence agencies and by the media into a superhuman figure capable of holding the world to ransom, and how this myth was exploited by the main actors in the Middle East conflict.
How They Stole the Game (1999) traced the rise to power of Fifa’s former president, Joao Havelange, and was the first book to reveal evidence of the corruption allegations that called Sepp Blatter’s 1998 victory as Fifa president into question. Blatter, who eventually resigned from Fifa in 2015, attempted to prevent publication, allowing the publishers to puff the book as “The book that Sepp Blatter wanted to ban”.
Yallop’s last book, Beyond Belief, published in 2010 to coincide with Pope Benedict XVI’S state visit to Britain, concerned sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic Church
Yallop’s other work included the screenplay for the film Chicago Joe and
the Showgirl (1990), starring Keifer Sutherland and Emily Lloyd. He was a co-writer of the Monty Python star Graham Chapman’s comic fictionalised autobiography, A Liar’s Autobiography,
Volume VI (1980) and ventured into fiction in 1999 with Unholy Alliance, about a drug cartel’s attempts to put their own man in the White House.
Yallop is survived by his wife Anna and by four children.
David Yallop, born January 27 1937, died August 31 2018