JOHNNY BYRNE, a Dublin working-class boy who made himself into one of Britain’s most successful TV writers, has died of cancer at his home in Norfolk, aged 72.
Childhood in a Seán McDermott Street tenement, leaving school at the age of 12, made an unlikely background for an output of gentle rural drama in English village and country settings.
But his imagination reached beyond the dales and the shires to the stars, as he also wrote science fiction. And he always told those who asked that his was a happy childhood.
The eldest of 13, he attended a national school in Denmark Street, off Henry Street, long since demolished to make way for the Ilac shopping centre (the black and white photo inset of him was taken when he was at the school).
At school he learned to read, and read well, and began a lifetime love for Shakespeare, whose plots he cheerfully plundered just as Shakespeare had done with Hollinshead’s Chronicles.
“Always with his nose stuck in a book,” is how his siblings described their eldest brother. The family moved away from Dublin city centre to Finglas, and Johnny left school at the age of 12 to earn money to help support the family. He was apprenticed to a fireplace manufacturer.
He joined a boxing club but reading was his passion. “He never took things at face value, always wanted to know more, to find out how things really were,” his wife Sandy said.
The apprenticeship ended, but no job ensued. Johnny, like many a Dubliner before him, took the boat from the North Wall to Liverpool. In the north of England he got work as an electrician’s mate, worked in a factory in Southport where the owner wanted to hold on to this bright young Irishman, but Johnny kept moving.
He worked in a baked bean factory in Birmingham, There was also a spell teaching English as a foreign language in London, Paris, Athens and Istanbul.
In Liverpool, he wrote poetry and with fellow poet Spike Hawkins staged jazz and poetry nights at Streate’s Coffee Bar, the “nursery” of the Liverpool poets. Adrian Henri met Roger McGough at Streate’s and Brian Patten gave his first reading there. There was a scuffle between Johnny and an equally unknown John Lennon at a lodging house in Toxteth. And Johnny’s science fiction writing began to take off.
Leading Canadian critic Judith Merrill selected a Johnny Byrne story for her collection The Best of Science Fiction 1965-1966.
In the late 1960s, Johnny was touring manager for his then agent’s (Shel Talmy) rock groups, which included the Kinks. In 1969 a novel Groupie Johnny co-wrote with rock chick Jenny Fabian and loosely based on her life, was a somewhat scandalous success. “The exotica of her world are the drugs she takes and the clothes she wears,” sniffed Rolling Stone magazine, overlooking the two main pillars of the 1960s.
Johnny was commissioned to write a film script for Spike Milligan’s autobiographical Adolf Hitler – My Part in his Downfall, released in 1972. Another film, To Die For followed in 1994, but neither matched the success of his work for the small screen which began with a 1970 BBC TV play Season of the Witch featuring Robert Powell, Paul Nicholas and singer Julie Driscoll. In this play about a girl who drops out of the typing pool, Robert Powell plays Shaun, the voice of conscience, in what may be the first broadcast instance of Johnny Byrne naming fictional characters after people he knew.
His friends got used to their names being borrowed. To know him was to find yourself being paged in airport scenes, have hotel managers, nightclub dancers and shop assistants named after you. Some even made it into space, in Space 1999. In this popular TV series, nuclear waste from earth stored on the moon knocks it out of its orbit and sends it and the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha hurtling uncontrollably into outer space.
Johnny Byrne was the most prolific script contributor to the first season (1973-5) and was initially story consultant for the second season (1976-7), but he objected to the American co-producers’ wish to shape the plots for a juvenile audience. Science fiction was not just a subject for children, he felt.
Fortunately British television’s need for well-crafted scripts for drama series kept him busy for the next three decades. From the converted garden shed in the village of Heydon in Norfolk poured a steady stream of high quality TV scripts.
Heartbeat has been the unrivalled king of Sunday night entertainment for many years. The first episode was shown in 1992, featuring Nick Berry as the policeman and Niamh Cusack as a young doctor. Johnny created the series for TV and was main scriptwriter until last year.
A new series begins this month. Johnny Byrne also wrote and script-edited episodes of All Creatures Great and Small, Love Hurts, featuring Adam Faith and Zoe Wanamaker, Noah’s Ark, One by One, and the much-missed Anglia TV series Tales of the Unexpected. His success as a writer was due to his interest in people.
“He liked people, enjoyed talking to them, wanted to know all about them,” his wife said. “Certain values and what he called the ‘small verities’ prevailed in all his writings and that is what people responded to in his work.”
Other interests included former Yugoslavia and Celtic mythology.
In 1975 Johnny Byrne married journalist Sandy Carrington-Mail and they lived in north Norfolk. They had three sons, and he died there on April 2nd having been ill since last August.
A memorial service in the Heydon village church of St Peter and St Paul on April 15th, 2008, was followed by a moving impromptu musical celebration of Johnny’s life in the Earle Arms across the road attended by nine of Johnny Byrne’s siblings from Ireland, and other family members as well as well as nearly 250 neighbours and friends.
John Christopher (Johnny) Byrne: born November 27th, 1935; died April 2nd, 2008.