Kevin Laffan

Creator of the long-running ITV soap opera 'Emmerdale Farm'

As the creator of the rural soap opera Emmerdale Farm, Kevin Laffan was responsible for television's second most enduring serial, after Coronation Street.

The matriarchal Annie Sugden faced life without her farmer husband, Jacob, who had died after spending much of his later years in the Woolpack pub, drinking away any profits. She aimed to make a go of the ailing farm by reuniting her two feuding sons, Jack and Joe, and accepting investment from an outsider, Henry Wilks, who had made his fortune in the Bradford wool industry and was bringing his business acumen to the Yorkshire Dales.

When Emmerdale Farm became simply Emmerdale and many of the trials and tribulations of the farm were replaced by raunchier storylines in the nearby village, Laffan voiced his objections. As the serial celebrated its 25th anniversary, in 1997, he said in an interview:

I'm against sex and violence. Families try not to quarrel and the drama lies in their trying not to. But, of course, it does break out occasionally – that's the climax. With sex, once you say a couple can get into bed together, what do you do next? You have to have the blanket going up and down. Then they do it without the blanket, and so on. The business, instead of the relationship between the people, becomes the drama.

Laffan had been born in the less rural surroundings of Reading in 1922, the son of a crippled Irish travelling photographer. After starting his career as an actor, he became artistic director at the Everyman Theatre, Reading, for seven years and, under the name Kevin Barry, wrote plays that included Ginger Bred (1951), The Strip-Tease Murder (with Neville Brian, 1955), Winner Takes All (1956) and First Innocent (1957).

Later, as Kevin Laffan, he enjoyed a West End stage hit with It's a Two Feet Six Inches Above the Ground World (1970), which was turned into a 1972 film with the reworked title It's a Two-Foot-Six-Inch-Above-the-Ground World. The screen sex comedy, starring Nanette Newman and Hywel Bennett as a Roman Catholic couple who adopt birth control, was later retitled The Love Ban.

By then, Laffan was establishing a reputation as a writer for television. He scripted the six-part Bud (1963), which featured the music-hall comedian Bud Flanagan playing a fictionalised version of himself, retired and trying his hand at a string of other jobs. He also wrote the ITV serial Castle Haven (1969), set in two large Victorian houses that had been converted into unfurnished flats in a Yorkshire coastal town, with the action revolving around the residents. Although now almost forgotten, it featured Roy Barraclough, Kathy Staff and Jill Summers, all of whom went on to find fame in other soaps.

Laffan's television plays included Decision to Burn (starring Anthony Hopkins, 1971) and The Best Pair of Legs in the Business, first produced for the small screen in 1968 but remade four years later as a feature film, with Reg Varney recreating his original role of an ageing holiday camp drag artist.

At about the same time came a phone call offering Laffan the chance to script a new, lunchtime serial, when ITV was looking for daytime programming in the wake of the Government's decision to relax restrictions on broadcasting hours, but the writer was not keen. He recalled:

Donald Baverstock, Yorkshire Television's director of programmes, phoned me and asked if I would like to write a farming serial. My first reaction was, "No, I wouldn't." I was a playwright at heart and my agent told me it would ruin my reputation. People are very funny. They think that, if you write a soap, you are going into the gutter. It's just a snobbish thing, really. Anyway, in the end I agreed. I was asked to write a three-month serial, so I wrote it as a 26-episode play and left the end open so that it could continue.

Laffan had worked on a farm near Walsall in his teens, although it was only for six months as a "fill-in" job in between work as an actor in repertory theatre. In writing about farm life, he was much more concerned with the characters than the job. "I was intrigued by the idea that farming was a way of life, as opposed to simply a way of earning a living," he explained to me. "I was interested in the mental attitude that set the two apart."

Emmerdale Farm, featuring the stage actress Sheila Mercier as Annie Sugden, began on 16 October 1972, at 1.30pm, with Jacob Sugden's funeral, a novel idea to bring together and introduce all the serial's characters in the fictional village of Beckindale. The Monday and Tuesday episodes were popular enough with mothers, pensioners and shift workers to earn the programme an extended run, until it eventually won a teatime slot and, in some ITV regions, was screened at 6.30pm.

Laffan stopped writing for the serial after 12 years but remained a consultant. In 1988, Emmerdale Farm was finally given a networked evening slot across the whole country and, the following year, its title was shortened to Emmerdale. The affairs, business and otherwise, of the newly arrived Tates at Home Farm became the centre of attention for many years, as the storylines' emphasis switched to the village, which itself was renamed Emmerdale in the year after the 1993 Lockerbie-style plane crash.

Laffan's other big television success was Beryl's Lot (1973-77), a comedy-drama inspired by the real-life story of the novelist Margaret Powell, a cook who married a milkman, prepared to take O and A levels as she approached 60, then had her first book published. For the television series, Carmel McSharry starred as a charlady in her forties, with a milkman husband and three children, and was seen starting evening classes in an attempt to improve her station in life.

Later, Laffan and Peter Jones wrote the sitcom I Thought You'd Gone (1984), in which Jones and Pat Heywood played the parents who moved to a smaller house in the country in the belief that their grown-up children had all finally left home. Of course, they were soon back. Laffan also contributed scripts to the espionage series Man in a Suitcase (1967, 1968), Kate (starring Phyllis Calvert as an agony columnist, 1970), the courtroom drama Justice (1973) and The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries (1993). His other stage plays included The Superannuated Man (1967) and Zoo Zoo Widdershins Zoo (1969).

Last year, Laffan was introduced to the Queen on the set of Emmerdale as it celebrated its 30th anniversary in her Golden Jubilee year.

Anthony Hayward

Kevin Barry Laffan, playwright and television scriptwriter: born Reading, Berkshire 24 May 1922; married Jeanne Thompson (three sons); died London 11 March 2003.