Stephen Churchett
Eastenders regular who also wrote the final episode of Morse
STEPHEN CHURCHETT, who has died aged 74, was an actor and writer who never became a big name, but he gave a degree of continuity on screen to Eastenders as Marcus Christie, a dodgy solicitor, and was entrusted with penning the final, tragic episode of Inspector Morse.
He first turned up in the BBC soap in 1990 as the shy, bumbling Marcus, not averse to bending the rules, when Phil Mitchell ran into trouble with the police over fake MOT certificates.
Phil and his brother Grant were usually his clients, whether trying to get their sister Sam sectioned in an attempt to stop her marrying Ricky Butcher, or helping Phil to sell his share of the Queen Vic pub to Dan Sullivan to spite Phil’s mother, Peggy, then conning Dan into giving it back in a poker game.
Marcus returned in 2004 to con Sam into selling the pub to Den Watts, but fled with the money himself. When Grant’s ex-wife, Sharon, tracked him down 10 years later, he agreed to help her with a scam against Phil, her husband-to-be. Churchett was back in 2015, unsuccessfully defending Max Branning on a murder charge – although it was later quashed.
“I’m a jobbing actor,” he said, “but I will never be a jobbing writer because of the effort and the angst involved.” But he was particularly satisfied writing for John Thaw in three different roles.
Commissioned to script two feature-length episodes of Kavanagh QC in 1999, with Thaw as the defence barrister, he regarded it as “good and serious” television, adding: “You can be quite literate in the long court scenes.”
In 2001 he wrote the final story, a year after penning the last episode of Inspector Morse, “The Remorseful Day”, with Thaw’s Oxford detective collapsing in a college quadrangle.
The writer also scripted an episode of the 2000 series Monsignor Renard,
starring Thaw as a French priest during the German occupation of his country.
“He was one of those actors you always wrote less for,” said Churchett. “You’d do a draft and you’d think, ‘Hang on, John could do that with a look. Oh, let’s just cut the dialogue.’ ” He went on to write six stories for the Morse spin-off Lewis.
Stephen George Churchett was born in Bromley, south London, on April 10 1947 to Joan (née Hortin) and Frank Churchett.
After studying Drama at Manchester University he gained rep experience before appearing in the Bertolt Brecht play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
(Saville Theatre, 1969). He recalled Leonard Rossiter as the mobster being impatient with actors who failed to reach his own heights of perfection.
Churchett’s own first play, Tom and Clem, was staged in the West End in 1997, at the Aldwych, with Michael Gambon as the homosexual Labour MP Tom Driberg and Alec Mccowen as the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, in a fictitious encounter at the 1945 Potsdam Conference.
Churchett claimed to have the “smallest speaking part ever on television” when he made his screen debut alongside Frankie Howerd in Up Pompeii!,
saying the single letter “V” (his number as a centurion).
He played Peter Hunt, half of the first gay couple in a British soap, in the daytime serial Together (1980-81), and was attacked by a Cyberman in a 1985 Doctor Who story. There was also a regular role as Joseph Wint (1992-94) in the 1920s fashion-house saga The House of Eliott.
He appeared in later series of the 1990s sitcom The Brittas Empire as the evil councillor Jack Drugget and popped up as a coroner throughout the Marple
series (2004-13). He also wrote six of the stories. “I’m still in awe of the fact that famous people are saying my words,” he said.
Churchett was unmarried.