John Finch obituary

Television scriptwriter who helped shape Coronation Street and created two popular dramas of the 1970s

John Finch, who has died aged 97, was a Coronation Street scriptwriter who helped to shape the television soap during its first decade before going on to create and write two hugely popular dramas also set in his native north of England.

A Family at War, regarded as one of the first “television novels”, followed the trials and tribulations of the lower-middle-class Ashtons of Liverpool as they faced conflicts of both a human kind and international proportions. Colin Douglas starred as Edwin, the patriarch, with Shelagh Fraser as his wife, Jean.

The family weathered the second world war on the home and foreign fronts and the series, according to Finch, was about “a family involved in a war rather than a war in which a family is involved”.

He spent a year researching the fashions, food and hair styles of the time, as well as popular music and comedians’ catchphrases, to integrate those details authentically with air raids, ration books and other measures governing everyday survival. A Family at War ran for 52 episodes from 1970 to 1972 and frequently topped the ratings, with more than 20 million viewers in Britain and many more around the world.

Switching from Liverpool to Yorkshire, Finch devised another television epic, Sam (1973-75), writing all 39 episodes. The semi-autobiographical drama, beginning in 1934, was set in fictional Skellerton, based on Featherstone, the West Riding town where he spent the final years of his childhood.

Like Finch, 10-year-old Sam experiences being abandoned by his father, sent to a charity school, going to sea to avoid working down the local pit and later taking a job in an engineering firm.

The story spans 40 years, from the harsh realities of the Depression, through growing postwar affluence, to 1973 and a new economic crisis, with Kevin Moreton playing Sam as a child, then Mark McManus as an adult, and demonstrates how people’s lives can be shaped by their past. It won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s award as best drama series in 1974.

Finch wrote 140 episodes for Coronation Street over a 10-year period, beginning with a commission for a trial script that was screened three months after the serial’s December 1960 debut. He said he was inspired by the “lively” characters created by Tony Warren, from the sex siren Elsie Tanner and hairnetted harridan Ena Sharples to the snooty publican Annie Walker and curmudgeonly pensioner Albert Tatlock.

He became the soap’s first freelance writer to be signed to a contract, followed by others such as Jack Rosenthal, Vince Powell and Harry Driver, and, when Ida Barlow, mother of Ken, was fatally hit by a bus later in 1961 – the second Street character to die – he scripted the funeral episode.

Finch said he learned to combine Warren’s comedy with his own realism – a valuable tool for his later dramas – and he was eventually able to mould new characters such as Stan and Hilda Ogden.

By the time he wrote the last of his Coronation Street episodes in 1970, he had also served as the serial’s script editor (1961-62) and producer (1968-69), and co-written a spin-off 1964 touring stage show, Firm Foundations.

Born in Liverpool, John was the son of Bertha (nee Ellison), a nurse turned health visitor, and Herbert Finch, an accountant. The family moved around Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire until, when John was nine, his father left with another woman, so he and his mother moved in with her father, Amos, a retired miner, in Featherstone.

When she could no longer afford to keep him, he was sent to a charity school in York, one of 12 schools he attended before starting his working life at 14 and going through various jobs.

In 1941, aged 16, he joined the merchant navy as an electrician, serving during the second world war on a freighter, a petrol tanker – at the height of the battle of the Atlantic – a troopship and a rescue tug before being medically discharged in 1945 on contracting malaria.

After the war, Finch was a trainee librarian at the miners’ welfare library in Featherstone, then – with ambitions to become a writer – spent seven years in London. For the first two, he worked by day as live-in secretary to the sculptor Jacob Epstein before renting a basement off Baker Street, where he did PR work, sold newspaper advertising space and contributed articles to magazines such as Picture Post.

Regarding himself as uneducated, Finch later reflected: “At an age when others of my generation were emerging from university, after their wartime experiences, I was basically a blank sheet of paper waiting to be written on. In the end, it all fell apart and I went back north, married and got down to the essential task of earning a living.”

Leyland Motors, in Lancashire, employed him to write press releases, then he worked for a Rochdale engineering company as publicity manager while continuing to write in the evenings.

Evening Song was broadcast by BBC radio in 1957, but two plays that Finch submitted to Granada Television, the Manchester-based ITV company – Dark Pastures, about Yorkshire miners, and The Schoolroom – were both turned down, although another ITV company, Rediffusion, produced the first, screened in 1958. Nevertheless, Granada recognised Finch’s talent for dialogue and invited him to write for Coronation Street.

He contributed episodes to many Granada series, including the Street sitcom spin-offs Pardon the Expression (1966) and Turn Out the Lights (1967), as well as City ’68 and an adaptation of Love on the Dole (1967), and wrote half a dozen plays for BBC television.

He followed A Family at War and Sam with more creations of his own, including This Year Next Year (1977) and The Spoils of War (1980-81), before leaving Granada.

His experience of living in a London basement led him to devise the ITV afternoon soap Rooms (1974-77), then he created the BBC series Flesh and Blood (1980-82) and, back at Granada, Capstick’s Law (1989).

Finch’s 1979 novel, Cuddon Return, about a Yorkshire mining village in the 1930s, was republished as A Shaft of Light in 2015, with a collection of poetry, Before, During and After the War, following in 2017. His autobiography will be published this summer.

In 1956, Finch married Cynthia Hickman, who died in 2017. He is survived by their two sons, Stephen and Peter.

• John Roland Finch, writer, born 12 February 1925; died 13 February 2022