Irene Shubik

Producer

IRENE SHUBIK, who has died at 89, was a TV producer who helped pioneer what is now considered to be the golden age of the single play – first at ITV with Armchair Theatre and then at the BBC.

Among the writers she commissioned were John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and John Mortimer, and her series credits include Rumpole of the Bailey and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet.

Born in London to a French mother and father who ran a textile factory, she read English Literature at university and tried unsuccessfully to find work with the BBC. Instead, she went to the US – first to Princeton, New Jersey, and then to Chicago. There, she found work as a documentary scriptwriter for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films.

Her return to Britain, where her parents were ailing, coincided with the start of ITV and a rapid expansion of television production and techniques.

She began contributing news items to This Week, the longrunning current affairs series established by Associated Rediffusion, but it was at ABC Television that she found her metier. She joined the company’s drama department in 1960, shortly after the Canadian producer Sydney Newman had been recruited to take over and modernise its Armchair Theatre strand of Sunday night plays. In early 1962, Shubik created British television’s first science fiction anthology series, Out of This World. When Newman moved to the BBC in 1963 as head of drama, Shubik went with him, and while he busied himself with Doctor Who, she produced another science fiction classic, the anthology series, Out of the Unknown, for the new BBC2.

She went on to co-produce the often controversial Wednesday Play strand on BBC1, which under her watch included The Right Prospectus by John Osborne and Edna, the Inebriate Woman, by Jeremy Sandford’.

It was while working on the series that she commissioned a play by John Mortimer, called Rumpole of the Bailey. When the BBC passed on a series, Ms Shubik took the idea and herself to Thames Television, where it ran until 1992.

By then, she had moved on to Granada, to make Paul Scott’s Staying On, in which Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson were reunited 35 years after Brief Encounter. Its success paved the way for Granada’s The Jewel in the Crown, for which she wrote the format on which the scripts were based. Ms Shubik’s partner was the late journalist, Andrew Dickson. Her brothers also predeceased her, and she is survived by her nieces.