Peter Tinniswood

Writer with a distinctive brand of gloomy northern surrealism

Peter Tinniswood, playwright and writer: born Liverpool 21 December 1936; twice married (two sons, two daughters); died London 9 January 2003.

In later life, the writer Peter Tinniswood complained that he had spread himself thin, and rarely produced his best work. But if he did not achieve greatness, he nevertheless managed ubiquity – novels, television and above all, radio – and there can be few people who have never been amused or unsettled at one time or another by his distinctive brand of gloomy northern surrealism.

He was born in Liverpool in 1936, but spent most of his early years in Sale, outside Manchester, where his mother ran a dry-cleaning shop: he later said that lurking under the counter, listening to the customers' conversation, was what gave him his ear for dialogue. After Sale County Grammar and Manchester University, he became a journalist, working on the Liverpool Echo, the Western Mail and, from 1958 to 1960, the Sheffield Star. It was at the Star that he met David Nobbs, now famous as the author of the Reggie Perrin novels. They began writing together – sketches for That Was the Week That Was and The Frost Report; but Tinniswood's creative urges didn't get free rein until the publication of his first novel, A Touch of Daniel, in 1968.

This was the work that introduced the Brandons, a grumbling northern household of nagging women and shiftless, taciturn men, afflicted by a mortality rate that swells from extreme to surreal over the course of the book. The Brandons reappeared in a 1973 novel, I Didn't Know You Cared, and a BBC television series of the same name. Although its reputation has been overshadowed by other comedies of the period, such as Fawlty Towers and Porridge, many retain fond memories of the atmosphere of dank pessimism, of Uncle Stavely's catch-phrase, "I 'eard that – pardon?", and Robin Bailey's marvellous performance as the appropriately named Uncle Mort, whose imperturbable gloom no ray of sunshine could penetrate. More significant for Tinniswood was the casting in later series of Liz Goulding as Carter Brandon's nagging, socially ambitious wife, Pat. She and Tinniswood married in 1981, and much of his later work was written with her in mind.

Other novels followed, several featuring the Brandons, and more TV: The Home Front – also a novel – starred Brian Glover as a bigoted northerner down south. Tinniswood's stage career had got off to a bad start in 1971, when The Investiture was slammed by Harold Hobson as the worst play he had ever seen. Although he never made it in the West End, Tinniswood's work was frequently performed, at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, under Alan Ayckbourn, Bristol Old Vic, Sheffield Crucible, the Bush and the National.

But his great love was radio, which gave scope to his enthusiasm for words, his taste for mixing registers and vocabularies. The total number of plays and series he wrote for Radio 4 is hard to compute; and the roster of stars drawn to his work is impressive: Judi Dench, Michael Williams, Billie Whitelaw, Jane Lapotaire, Stephanie Cole, Maurice Denham. Most recently, Paul Scofield marked his 80th birthday by starring in Anton in Eastbourne, broadcast on Radio 4 in November.

Tinniswood's keenness on sports, especially cricket, inspired Tales from a Long Room – the work for which, after I Didn't Know You Cared, he is probably best remembered. In these monologues, the Brigadier, a drawling, elderly gentleman played by Robin Bailey, offered eccentric musings on "our summer game" and updates on events in the hamlet of Witney Scrotum, dotted with weirdly inconsequential namechecks for cricketing personalities (particularly the umpire Mr H.D. "Dickie" Bird). The Brigadier turned up in several series on Radio 4, as well as half a dozen books, a short-lived television version, and a long-running column in The Cricketer magazine.

The 1987 radio play The Village Fête introduced the Empson family – grousing Father, hypochondriac William, nymphomaniac Rosie, the whole neurotic ensemble presided over by kind, sensible Nancy. They were taken up by the local poacher and rural sage, Winston Hayballs (the juxtaposition of characters called William Empson and Winston Hayballs gives you a pretty good idea of the Tinniswood style and range of reference), whose earthy common sense rescued them from all sorts of scrapes, while his erotic enthusiasm gave Nancy an unexpected dose of happiness: a little like Jeeves as written by D.H. Lawrence. Five series of Winston's adventures followed between 1989 and 1994. The atmosphere of the Winston stories – as with so much of his work, it is the atmosphere that lingers – is one of rural idyll overlaid with surrealist anxiety; they are his most underrated work.

Throughout his career, his rate of production was impressive. He himself lamented that his inability to say no, and his tendency to try anything once, had led him to spread himself thin. In all honesty, it is hard to disagree with his own judgement: the later outings of the Brigadier and the Brandons, in a number of Radio 4 series, lacked the verve and imagination of the originals.

In 1995, on a visit to the dentist, Tinniswood was diagnosed with oral cancer, the result of years of pipe smoking. He subsequently had his voice box removed, and had to speak through a tube that produced a Dalek-like sound. He had been divorced from Liz Goulding – who had starred in much of his work, and whom he regarded as his muse – for a couple of years; but now he moved into her house, and she cared and interpreted for him throughout his illness.

This was often traumatic – at one point, he nearly bled to death following a haemorrhage. Curiously, though, as Tinniswood liked to point out, losing his actual voice enabled him to recover his writing voice. He put on a spurt of productivity – 10 radio plays in five years: one, The Goalkeeper's Boo-boo, still remains to be produced. Two plays, The Scan and The Voice Boxer, performed at Bristol Old Vic in 2000 as a double-bill under the title Croak, Croak, Croak dealt more or less directly with his illness. He began writing The Scan in his head while entombed inside a body-scanner, as a way of combating claustrophobia: in it, the main character finds words bursting out of him, unbidden. In The Voice Boxer, a man who has had a laryngectomy finds that his voice has taken on a life of its own and gone travelling.

The evident reference here to Gogol's The Nose is a reminder of an international dimension to his work that is easy to overlook, thanks to his obsessions with cricket and the minutiae of English life. Tinniswood himself talked of European absurd theatre as an influence, and he also translated the plays of Eduardo da Filippo – his version of Napoli Milionaria, transplanted from Naples to Liverpool, was staged at the National Theatre in 1991, directed by Richard Eyre, and starring Ian McKellen as the paterfamilias. Da Filippo's belief in the marital bed as the heart of domestic life chimes in with Tinniswood's own convictions about the energising properties of sexual desire, whether expressed or sublimated.

But still, Tinniswood was essentially an English writer – more than that, a northern English writer. Paying tribute to him on Radio 4 this week, the radio critic Gillian Reynolds suggested comparison with Robb Wilton and Tommy Handley, fellow natives of Liverpool. But you can also see points of resemblance to both Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood – the talkative women, the nose for euphemism and bathos, the same determination to look on the bleak side, and the relish of trivial pleasures like custard creams. Like them, Tinniswood developed a particular strain of gritty realism – a strain that relies on the recognition that sometimes the grittiness may just be the result of eating custard creams in bed.

Robert Hanks