Betty Willingale
Television script editor behind I, Claudius, Midsomer Murders and a string of other hit adaptations
BETTY WILLINGALE, who has died aged 93, worked on television adaptations of literary blockbusters for the BBC before turning to crime with Agatha Christie’s Poirot and discovering the books that translated to the small screen as The Midsomer Murders on ITV.
As the BBC’S first staff script editor, she made her reputation on adaptations – she preferred to call them dramatisations – of such classics as North and South (1975) and her greatest triumph,
I, Claudius (1976).
Usually working with drama producer Jonathan Powell, she script edited successful televised versions of A Christmas Carol (1977), worked closely with John le Carré on Arthur Hopcraft’s dramatisation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), Alan Plater on The Barchester Chronicles (1982) and Angus Wilson on The Old Men at the Zoo (1983).
Of all triangular relationships, someone noted, few are more fraught than that between book, adapter and screen. As a product of the BBC “old school”, Betty Willingale exemplified, in the view of one of her many protégés, the screenwriter W Stephen Gilbert, “the high art of matchmaking, that nose for marrying adapter to novel that is simply the best in television – indeed in the history of television.”
She had taken her pension from the BBC to go freelance in the late 1980s when she joined the independent production company Carnival working on Agatha Christie’s Poirot, with David Suchet as the Belgian detective and which became a fixture on ITV throughout the 1990s. One of the writers was another Betty Willingale find, Anthony Horowitz, who came to admire her unerring feel for the shape and the balance of a script.
She also optioned the then little-known Inspector Barnaby crime novels of Caroline Graham, which she considered “Agatha Christie on acid” and which ITV again snapped up for a series. The original title was simply Barnaby, until Horowitz – once more brought in by Betty Willingale to adapt the stories for television – realised that the picture-postcard setting was the real hero and suggested Midsomer Murders.
The first in the canon, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, starring John Nettles as Chief Inspector Barnaby, was screened in 1998. The Midsomer Murders series is now in its 23rd year and broadcast worldwide, Betty Willingale having continued to work as a consultant producer until 2019.
She discovered Troy Kennedy Martin after reading his novel Beat on a Damask Drum (1959), urging the BBC to take him on as a script adapter before he went on to create the groundbreaking Z Cars.
Another notable writer on Betty Willingale’s slate was Dennis Potter, who apologised for the late delivery (by two days) of all seven handwritten scripts for The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978).
Betty Willingale produced the BBC dramatisation of Mansfield Park in 1983, as well as the critically acclaimed Tender Is the Night (1985), adapted by Dennis Potter and for which she vetoed Jeff Goldblum in the role of Dick Diver in favour of Peter Strauss. After fraught negotiations with 20th Century Fox Television in Hollywood, and filming in the south of France in atrocious weather, she referred to it as Tender Is the Nightmare.
In 1987 she worked with the playwright Alan Plater on his dramatisation of Fortunes of War, Olivia Manning’s novels about the Second World War, co-produced with American money and then the BBC’S most expensive drama series with a budget of £6 million. With Betty Willingale, Plater compressed 1,600 paperback pages into seven hours of television, delivering a script every three weeks for 21 weeks.
Much of the series was shot on location in Greece, where Betty Willingale found herself at odds with the actress and culture minister Melina Mercouri over having to hire huge numbers of unnecessary crew members. “It’s the film business,” Mercouri shrugged.
Betty Willingale was credited with introducing Kenneth Branagh to his co-star Emma Thompson (they later married) and remained on good terms with her writers because, as Alan Plater pointed out, “she doesn’t mess with their work.”
The younger daughter of a Thames lighterman, Betty Kathleen Willingale was born on July 27 1927 in Rotherhithe and won a scholarship to Aylwin Grammar School for Girls. When war came she was on holiday on the Moray Firth and remained in Scotland for a year, returning to London until the Blitz, when the school was evacuated to Rickmansworth.
Although Betty left in 1944 with no qualifications, the BBC offered her a job at Bush House, then the headquarters of the Overseas (now World) Service. “I can’t work there!” she exclaimed to her interviewer. “I’ve never met a foreigner!” She began as a dogsbody in the library, shelving books and delivering the evening papers around the offices.
In 1955 she transferred to the television script library, then at Lime Grove, and where one of the drama writers, Nigel Kneale, creator of Quatermass, showed Betty how to read a script. (The first was set in a vicarage. A maid comes in. “Vicar, the undertaker’s in the parlour screwing down the missus and there’s boiled egg for tea.” Somewhat implausibly, Betty was told this was “quite a good script”.)
At a time when the new ITV network was making the creative running, Betty Willingale transferred to the script unit, liaising with the drama department and writing rejection letters to aspiring writers.
Having turned down an offer to be a script editor on Z Cars (“too frightening”), she took on the same role on the twice-weekly soap Compact. When it was eventually cancelled in 1965, she worked for Campbell Logan, gruff producer of the weekly 30-minute classic serial (a title she hated).
She recalled the screenwriter Vincent Tilsley having looked shell-shocked in 1956 after being handed a copy of David Copperfield and told to turn it into 13 episodes. His 1966 remake starred Ian Mckellen, with Betty Willingale as script editor and Joan Craft – who had recently filmed A Tale Of Two Cities using a mob of just 11 extras to storm the Bastille – as director.
Asked for a second shot at Dickens, Betty Willingale hit on the combination of Julia Jones and Donald Churchill to dramatise her favourite novel, Our Mutual Friend (1976).
For BBC Two, she suggested a dramatisation of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South for the classic evening serial slot in 1975. She then script-edited I, Claudius, a job complicated by Jack Pulman struggling with writer’s block through all 13 episodes based on Robert Graves’s two novels of the Roman empire.
Although the show became one of the BBC’S biggest successes, Betty Willingale remembered the series producer Martin Lisemore turning to her in the gallery after the final take and telling her “he never wanted to see another ----ing toga again”.
In the BBC Club John Hurt (playing Caligula) told her he had always wanted to play Raskolnikov, with the result that Jack Pulman dramatised Crime and Punishment (1979).
After Betty Willingale retired from the BBC in 1987, she joined Carnival Films. As well as Poirot, her credits included Forever Green with John Alderton and Pauline Collins and Jeeves and Wooster with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. With her friend Georgina Abrahams, she produced two TV adaptations of Mary Wesley novels, Harnessing Peacocks (1993) and The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1995).
Her work on the TV miniseries Bleak House (1985) and Fortunes of War earned her Bafta nominations. She received lifetime achievement awards from both Bafta and the Royal Television Society.
Among the young protégés she mentored, many, like Paula Milne (a former trainee), William Humble and Douglas Watkinson, have become successful screenwriters.
Betty Willingale was unmarried.