This is taken from The Times:

Allan Prior
January 13, 1922 - June 1, 2006
Playwright, novelist and scriptwriter who brought a new realism to television police drama in Z Cars

WITH more than 300 television scripts to his name Allan Prior may have supplied more words for the small screen than any other writer. He was also the author of more than 30 radio plays and about 20 novels. But there was quality as well as quantity and, whether he was creating his own material or servicing existing formats, his work was distinguished by fluent storytelling and lively dialogue.

His most original and enduring contribution to television was as a founder writer of Z Cars, which in the 1960s broke the mould of television police drama. It was set in the previously neglected North and took a tougher and less sentimental view of the police than that of the blander, London-based Dixon of Dock Green. Unlike the other Z Cars writers, Prior, who had long lived in Lancashire, was able to draw on first-hand knowledge.

His other big popular success, though in a very different vein, was the soap opera Howards’ Way, which he created with the producer Gerard Glaister. Seen as a riposte to glamorous American shows such as Dynasty, it followed the boardroom battles and sexual adventures of a wealthy sailing fraternity, a “gin and Jaguar” set, on the South Coast of England. Although mocked by highbrow critics, it served its purpose as undemanding entertainment, ran from 1985 to 1990 and attracted up to 14 million viewers.

Allan Prior was born in Newcastle upon Tyne but spent much of his early life in and around Blackpool, where he attended the grammar school. Like many an officer in the First World War, his father had found work difficult to come by in the postwar years and had been forced to take on increasingly unfulfilling jobs as a commercial traveller. Prior was determined that the same should not happen to him.

His career as a writer started in 1943 when, as a 21-year-old, he was stationed with the 130 Spitfire Squadron at Ballyherbert in Co Down. A fellow airman had shown him a story he was sending in to a competition. Prior read it, was impressed, but thought he could do as well if not better. The squadron was taking a break from flying so Prior tore two pages out of a log-book and wrote the story of the son of a Co Down farmer who leaves the land to join the RAF.

He won the competition and, on the back of it, had stories accepted by literary magazines until the opening of the second front took him to Belgium and Germany and left little time for writing. After the war he took an office job in the Civil Service which, although boring and poorly paid, was at least secure. But the urge to write eventually prevailed and, after a couple of years, he traded security for freedom despite having a wife and two young children to support.

In 1948, with Norman Swallow — who later became a distinguished name in television documentary — he wrote a radio programme about Blackpool for the BBC’s North Region. This led to more radio work, including a dramadocumentary about Gypsies that won a glowing review from the Manchester Guardian. It was his first attempt to write dialogue for actors and he realised that he had a natural aptitude for it.

Although he turned down the chance of a job at the BBC, he wrote more radio plays, one of which, The Prawn King, was based on the life of his grandfather, a famous Newcastle fishmonger. He also realised his ambition to have a novel published. A Flame in the Air, about men returning from the war to a northern town, was accepted by Michael Joseph, came out in 1951 and was favourably reviewed by J. B. Priestley and John Betjeman.

During the 1950s he wrote two or three radio plays a year and moved into television, where his early work included plays and adaptations for the ITV Armchair Theatre series, a BBC serial, Starr and Company, another serial, Yorky, with Bill Naughton, and episodes of the ITV series Deadline Midnight. By the time he was approached to write for Z Cars he was an experienced, reliable and highly professional writer.

The Z Cars format was devised by Troy Kennedy Martin, who took his inspiration from an American police series, Highway Patrol. Z Cars, which went on the air at the beginning of 1962, was rooted in the North of England, specifically in fictional versions of Kirkby, a working-class overspill of Liverpool, and the nearby docks. Prior, who knew what it was to live on a Lancashire council estate, was on familiar territory.

Prior wrote five of the first ten Z Cars episodes. One of them, Big Catch, a fact-based story of Norwegian whalers on one of their regular visits to the Liverpool docks, was described by the critic Philip Purser as “the best series drama, live or filmed, I have ever seen on television”. Prior wrote more than 80 Z Cars scripts during the programme’s 16-year run and if the later ones did not always have the freshness and bite of the early episodes they were never less than expertly crafted.

He also wrote 37 episodes of the Z Cars spin-off, Softly Softly, which ran for ten years from 1966. When Charlie Barlow, the bullying detective played by Stratford Johns, was given his own series, Barlow at Large, Prior, once more, was the scriptwriter. But although he later wrote for two other police shows, The Sweeney and Juliet Bravo, his work was so varied that he never ran the risk of being typecast in one genre.

During the 1960s he returned to Armchair Theatre with a number of original plays, while contributing to popular series such as Dr Finlay’s Casebook. During the 1970s he continued to alternate between original plays, adaptations and episodes of series, the latter including The Onedin Line, Sutherland’s Law and The Expert. He also made a couple of trips to Hollywood, to work on films of his novels, but having no control over his material disheartened him.

Notable among his later work was The Charmer (1987), a six-part ITV series set in the late 1930s about an engaging con man who preyed on and cheated women. Prior’s starting point was two novels by a neglected writer, Patrick Hamilton, who had partly based the character on the murderer Neville Heath. It proved ideal casting for Nigel Havers. The same actor played an RAF pilot badly burnt and disfigured during the Battle of Britain in A Perfect Hero, Prior’s adaptation of a novel by Christopher Matthew inspired by the story of Richard Hillary.

Meanwhile, Prior had kept up a steady output of novels and in 1991 he published Führer, a study of Adolf Hitler which he described as “90 per cent factual and 10 per cent informed guesswork”. Prior adapted it as a four-hour radio serial, broadcast on Radio 4 in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversay of the end of the Second World War. In two other late novels, The Old Man and Me (1994) and The Old Man and Me Again (1996), Prior mixed fiction with autobiography to present a shrewdly observed portrait of life in Blackpool in the 1930s and after the Second World War.

Allan Prior is survived by his second wife, Norma, and by a son and two daughters, one of whom is the folk singer Maddy Prior.

Allan Prior, playwright, television scriptwriter and novelist, was born on January 13, 1922. He died on June 1, 2006. aged 84.