Keith Waterhouse, screenwriter and journalist
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b. 6/2/1929; d. 4/9/2009
My one brief contact with the prolific screenwriter and journalist Keith Waterhouse was characteristic of the man. In 1992 he and his friend Ned Sherrin waved as they sent a bottle of champagne over to the young actress Tara Fitzgerald, with whom I was having a drink after interviewing her about her role opposite Peter O’Toole in the Sherrin stage production of Waterhouse’s Our Song. Waterhouse will be principally remembered for two things: as writer of Billy Liar in all its forms, first as novel (1959), then – working with his long-time collaborator Willis Hall – as play (1960) and screenplay (1963); and as a Fleet Street legend who wrote countless columns for the Daily Mirror (1951-1986) and the Daily Mail (1986-2009). In Who’s Who, however, he listed his only hobby as lunch – and by implication he meant the liquid variety.
What was possible to miss amid the eulogies that marked his death, however, was the invigorating influence his direct style of writing had on British cinema and particularly television. His first job as a screenwriter (collaborating as usual with Hall) was adapting Mary Hayley Bell’s novel Whistle Down the Wind for Bryan Forbes’ 1961 film, a Hayley Mills vehicle about a child who discovers a runaway killer in her family’s barn and believes him when he says he’s Jesus. For John Schlesinger, Waterhouse and Hall adapted Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving in 1962, followed by Billy Liar. By the time those films had been linked to the ‘angry young men’ generation of British film-makers, Waterhouse was already channelling his anger and opinions into Sherrin’s television satire show That Was the Week That Was (1962-63).
Television absorbed most of Waterhouse’s creative writing from that point onwards, though he and Hall did an uncredited screenplay polish for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). His TV triumphs include the subsequent satire show The Frost Report (1966-67), Inside George Webley (1968-70), the cult Adam-Faith-as-petty-crook vehicle Budgie (1971 – the blueprint for the later, bigger success Minder), the TV series of Billy Liar (1973-74), the kids’ show Worzel Gummidge (1979-81) and the 1985 curiosity Charters & Caldicott, a series based on the two cricket-loving Englishmen from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.
Waterhouse’s career was capped, though, by the huge success of his 1989 play about an old drinking buddy: Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. Despite Waterhouse’s own, much-celebrated love of the bottle, he never stopped writing and lived to be 80.
Nick James