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14 hours ago
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Barbara Clegg, who has died aged 98, had a successful acting career before moving into writing, and managed to make an impact on popular culture in both disciplines.
She came to wider public attention when, in 1958, she joined the medical drama Emergency Ward 10, ITV’s first twice-weekly soap opera, to play Nurse Jo Buckley. She soon became a leading character, grabbing headlines for courting then marrying Desmond Carrington’s Dr Chris Anderson, but she left the show after 18 months, tiring of the general public continually mistaking her for her fictional character. A year later the producers decided to kill off Jo and her baby in a drowning accident off-screen, which prompted hundreds of complaints from viewers.
In 1983, Clegg made history by becoming the first woman to write a story for the long-running science fiction series Doctor Who (then in its 20th year). Enlightenment is an unusual, beguiling and highly regarded adventure, boasting a memorable first cliffhanger in which Peter Davison’s Doctor realises that the sailing yacht he has landed on is in fact a spaceship in disguise.
The story was also, unusually, directed by a woman (Fiona Cumming), and its fascinating preoccupation with the nature of humanity – the villains are bored, empty, aliens who need human imagination and emotion to spark their existence – marks it out as a thoughtful and atypical entry into the show’s canon.
Clegg was born in Manchester and brought up in Gatley, the daughter of Ethel (nee Moores) and Herbert, who together had an artificial flower-making and display business. Barbara attended Culcheth Hall school, Altrincham, and then boarded at Cheltenham Ladies’ college: while she was away there Herbert died, leaving Ethel to manage the business.
Although she harboured theatrical ambitions, Barbara read English literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (which then had a quota system allowing a limited number of female undergraduates), at her mother’s insistence. The stage was in her blood though – her great-great-grandmother had run a travelling theatre – and, having performed with university dramatic societies at Oxford, she joined Dundee repertory company as an assistant stage manager on graduating in 1948.
After acquitting herself well replacing an unwell cast member in a production of Mary Rose she was soon playing decent parts including Tweeny in The Admirable Crichton (1948) and the title role in Rebecca (1950).
Repertory stints in Liverpool and Sheffield followed and then it was to the Old Vic company in 1953, swelling the court in Richard Burton’s Hamlet in Elsinore and Switzerland. By 1954 the roles were better – her Maria in Twelfth Night jousted with Burton’s Toby Belch and Michael Hordern’s Malvolio. She then toured Australia with the company, performing with Katharine Hepburn and Robert Helpmann in The Merchant of Venice (as Nerissa) and Measure for Measure (1954-55).
Her television acting debut came with a BBC Sunday Night Theatre play Who Goes There! (1956), and after Emergency Ward 10 she starred opposite Robert Shaw in NJ Crisp’s The Dark Man (1960) and was a regular in the ATV serial Strange Concealments (1962).
She had met Paul Johnstone when they appeared together in a play at Oxford: he proposed but she turned him down in order to pursue her theatrical career. They stayed in touch though, and finally got engaged in 1961 – by this time he was a BBC producer whose credits included Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (1952-54) and The Sky at Night (from 1957). He later became head of the BBC’s Archaeological and Historical Unit, producing the landmark series Chronicle (1966-76).
After they married in 1962 she decided to give up acting in order to raise a family, but her earliest ambition had been to write and that was something she could do concurrently. First came Coronation Street (1961) – she wrote seven episodes in the soap’s first year – and then she joined the much-loved BBC radio serial The Dales (previously Mrs Dale’s Diary) in 1963, contributing a vast number of episodes until it ended in 1969.
She quickly moved on to its successor, Waggoners’ Walk, remaining with it for a decade until it was controversially pulled by the BBC for cost-cutting reasons in 1980. She also adapted John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids for Radio 4 in 1981: good preparation for her subsequent Doctor Who engagement.
After Enlightenment she wrote no further Doctor Who scripts for television despite submitting other storylines – those ideas were eventually developed and produced by the audio company Big Finish in 2010 and 2011 and one was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra.
Her other television writing work included episodes of Crossroads (1969), the short-lived Southern Television retirement home soap opera Together (1980-81) and ITV’s thrice-weekly fashion industry daytime serial Gems (1985-86).
In 1993 she wrote the book The Man Who Made Littlewoods about her uncle, the self-made millionaire, businessman and philanthropist Sir John Moores, and in her later years she devoted herself to charity work.
Paul died in 1976. She is survived by their children, Adam, Rufus and Jemima, and three grandchildren.
