Anthony Read: Writer and producer who gave Douglas Adams his first break and kept 'Doctor Who' going during troubled times

He was a tireless President of the Writer's Guild and in later years was able to concentrate entirely on writing history

Read: he earned a reputation as a safe pair of hands who could be brought in (Rex)

The generous and modest writer Anthony Read gave Douglas Adams his first television commission, successfully fighting doubtful BBC executives to launch a young writer whose undisciplined but bountiful imagination he was convinced was a potential goldmine. But Read should also be remembered in his own right, as a television producer and script editor who helped Doctor Who through troubled times and helped rejuvenate Hammer Films, and as a fine children's author and a sensitive, engaging historian.

He was born in Staffordshire in 1935. His father, a miner, died when Read was seven, leaving his mother, a dressmaker, to raise him alone. After Queen Mary's Grammar School in Walsall he studied acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama and founded a touring company, Theatre Unlimited, but his theatrical career was short-lived, and after a stint as an advertising copywriter, National Service as a gunner with the Royal Artillery and a job as editor at Jonathan Cape, he joined the BBC in 1963.

He script-edited a series of Sherlock Holmes dramatisations starring Douglas Wilmer which were popular but fraught with difficulties; it was valuable experience, Read earning himself a reputation as a safe pair of hands and regularly being called upon thereafter when programmes were in crisis. Aptly, his first producing job was on The Troubleshooters (1966-70), a saga of oil company skulduggery. Read then produced the equally popular The Lotus Eaters (1972), an offbeat saga of expats living on a Mediterranean island, each with a secret never to be told.

He left the BBC to go freelance when he felt that “the suits had moved in and the fun had moved out”, and contributed scripts to a range of shows including the daytime drama Marked Personal (1974), Scottish newspaper series The Standard (1978) and Z Cars, then in its final years but still a home for good storytelling. He wrote the opening episode of the massively popular (if critically scorned) The Professionals (1977), and contributed to BBC Scotland's eerie The Omega Factor (1979), a series about paranormal investigators that was years ahead of its time, and the wonderfully strange Sapphire and Steel (1981). Read was far from keen to return to production when the BBC contacted him with an offer he couldn't refuse.

The first three years of Tom Baker's reign as Doctor Who, under mettlesome producer Philip Hinchcliffe, were the most successful time in the history of the original series, but complaints from Mary Whitehouse about the levels of violence and horror on display during Saturday teatimes, and late-'70s inflation levels that made credible low-budget sci-fi, in the age of Star Wars, a virtual impossibility, had plunged the show into jeopardy.

Perspicacious Head of Serials Graeme McDonald invited Read back to the Corporation as a script editor and to assist the new, less experienced producer, Graham Williams. It was an appointment that would normally be seen as a demotion, until McDonald mentioned that it was for Doctor Who. “Ah, that's different” was Read's response: to him the series was imaginative, challenging and fun.

A bookish, experienced and tasteful man was just what the doctor ordered, as it turned out. Taking inspiration from literature and classical mythology (noting the similarities between Greek myths and science fiction), Read did his best to keep Doctor Who afloat and ship-shape in stormy waters.

In crisis times, old pros were relied on, but when he was shown an early draft of a radio serial entitled The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Read was convinced its young writer was worth commissioning for the programme. Douglas Adams' resultant script, The Pirate Planet, was a great success, prompting Graeme McDonald to gamely admit to Read that he had been wrong in opposing the idea.

After two years on Doctor Who, Read decided to focus on his passion for history, and was commissioned to write a book on the Tehran Conference. The BBC tried to retain him but couldn't match the advance Read's publishers were offering; however, Read's inside source on the story was assassinated before work could begin, and with the project scuppered, he made an unplanned return to television, this time brought in to hurriedly rescue Hammer Films' plans to produce a television series after several years in the wilderness.

Read found that the scripts awaiting him were hopelessly outdated, and so quickly wrote a launch episode which set a different benchmark, of contemporary suspense and frank horror. Hammer House of Horror (1980) turned out to be a surprise success, its plentiful scares etching themselves vividly on a whole generation. As a children's writer, his fascination with myths led to Into the Labyrinth (1981); another children's success was the fondly remembered John Wyndham story Chocky (1984), and he also created and wrote the Sunday night veterinary saga One by One (1984).

He was a tireless President of the Writer's Guild from 1981-82, and in later years he was able to concentrate entirely on writing history, often with his long-time collaborator David Fisher. His specialist field was the Second World War: he won the Wingate Literary Prize for Kristallnacht (1989) and equally impressive were Berlin: The Biography of a City (1994) and The Devil's Disciples: The Lives and Times of Hitler's Inner Circle (2003).

His talent as a children's author and his fascination with the past came together most fruitfully with the charming The Baker Street Boys, a series of books for which he won a Writer's Guild Award and which were successfully dramatised for television in 1983. They typify Read's combination of intelligence and accessibility, his good nature and his skill at what children will always warm to: traditional storytelling.

Anthony Read, writer, producer and historian: born Cheslyn Hay, Staffordshire 21 April 1935; married 1958 Rosemary Elizabeth Kirby (two daughters); died Taplow, Buckinghamshire 21 November 2015.