Stephen Churchett, actor who played the shifty lawyer Marcus Christie in EastEnders and writer who delivered the last episode of Inspector Morse – obituary

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, on and off over a quarter of a century, 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 at his garage.

Phil and his brother Grant were usually his clients when he reappeared, whether trying to get their sister Sam sectioned in an attempt to stop her marrying Ricky Butcher, being present when Grant was questioned over the murder of Eddie Royle, or helping Phil to sell his share of the Queen Vic pub to Dan Sullivan to spite his own mother, Peggy, then conning Dan into giving it back in a poker game.

Churchett returned to the role 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, before the actor was back for a final stint in 2015, unsuccessfully defending Max Branning on a murder charge – although it was later quashed.

“I’m a jobbing actor,” Churchett told The Stage in 1999, “but I will never be a jobbing writer because of the effort and the angst involved. Having been an actor, I know about dialogue – what can be said and what cannot be said, and what works rhythmically in speech.”

Thriving on having a specific actor to write for, Churchett was particularly satisfied at putting words into John Thaw’s mouth in three different roles.

When he was commissioned by the senior ITV drama producer Ted Childs to write two of the later feature-length episodes of Kavanagh QC in 1999, with Thaw as the defence barrister and working-class-boy-made-good, he regarded it as “good and serious” television, adding: “You can be quite literate in the long court scenes.”

He also scripted the final story in 2001, a year after writing the last episode of Inspector Morse, “The Remorseful Day”, for Childs, with Thaw’s classical music-loving Oxford detective suffering a heart attack, collapsing in a college quadrangle amid the dreaming spires and dying in hospital.

Churchett read that Colin Dexter novel on Brighton beach. “One of the greatest pleasures was choosing the music,” he told Toby Hadoke in a 2016 interview. “When he has his heart attack, I had ‘In Paradisum’ from Fauré’s Requiem. I have strong memories of endlessly playing that at home.”

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 in the Second World War.

“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, starring Kevin Whately as Thaw’s promoted former sidekick, between 2006 and 2013.

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 repertory theatre experience before appearing in a West End production of 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, and the future sitcom star giving electricians a “bollocking” when they were making a noise off stage.

Churchett’s own first play, Tom and Clem, was in the West End in 1997, at the Aldwych Theatre, with Michael Gambon as the homosexual Labour MP Tom Driberg and Alec McCowen as Prime Minister Clement Attlee in a fictitious encounter between the pair at the 1945 postwar Potsdam Conference.

As a TV actor, Churchett claimed to have the “smallest speaking part ever on television” when he made his screen debut alongside Frankie Howerd in the sitcom Up Pompeii!, saying the single letter “V” (his number as a centurion).

He then took a string of bit parts, played Peter Hunt, half of the first gay couple in a British soap, in the daytime serial Together (1980-81) – recalling the “panic” of it reviving the practice of broadcasting live, especially when topical news was inserted into scripts on the day – and was attacked by a Cyberman in a 1985 Doctor Who story.

There was also a regular role as Joseph Wint (1992-94) from the second run of the 1920s fashion-house series The House of Eliott, spoofed by French and Saunders as “House of Idiot”, which he regarded as “superb”.

He then appeared in later series (1994-97) of the sitcom The Brittas Empire as the evil councillor Jack Drugget and popped up several times as a coroner throughout the Marple series (2004-13), with Geraldine McEwan, then Julia McKenzie, as Agatha Christie’s ageing sleuth.

When Ted Childs watched Churchett’s play Heritage at the Hampstead Theatre in 1997, featuring George Cole, he recognised a cinematic quality in his writing and gave him the chance, in middle age, to script for the screen.

Between 2004 and 2008, he wrote six of the Marple stories. “I’m still in awe of the fact that famous people are saying my words,” he said.

“On one of the Marples, with David Warner, one of the great Hamlets of his generation, we had the read-through, then I had a phone call at home with a rather echoey David Warner saying, ‘I just wondered, Stephen, could I just change this “and” to a “but” on Page 13?’

“I said, ‘You’re a bit echoey,’ and he said, ‘I’m in my bath.’ And I thought, ‘David Warner is calling me from his bath to ask permission to change an “and” to a “but”. It can’t get better than that.’ ”

Churchett never married.

Stephen Churchett, born April 10 1947, died January 11 2022