Robert Banks Stewart: Screenwriter whose long list of hits included Doctor Who, Shoestring, Lovejoy and The Darling Buds of May

Banks Stewart was a thoughtful writer, always more interested in human stories than car chases and punch-ups

Throughout the 1960s and '70s there was barely a crime series that didn't bear his name at some stage (Wikimedia)

In the glory days of British television, writers tended to be divided between those who wrote for genre series and those more celebrated types, the creators of dramas that imagined their own space, especially those who did it via the single play. It has meant that many gifted TV writers never received the wider recognition they deserve, writers such as Roger Marshall, Robert Holmes – and Robert Banks Stewart, who has died at the age of 84 after a fabulous, diverse career writing and creating high quality popular drama for the small screen.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s there was barely a crime series that didn't bear his name at some stage. But he was a thoughtful writer, always more interested in human stories than car chases and punch-ups, and that sensitivity is best exemplified by his finest achievement, the creation of the Sunday night series Shoestring (1979-80), the BBC's first truly successful private eye show.

It launched the television career of Trevor Eve as a nervy, nosey and affable ex-computer programmer employed by a local radio station to solve listeners' problems and deliver an hour of radio each week telling stories of his cases.

Shoestring was hugely influential. It was devised after the BBC dropped the hysterical Target (1977-78), their catastrophic attempt to emulate the success of The Sweeney (which Stewart also wrote for). Stewart instead devised a more cerebral mystery drama and in a refreshing different location: Bristol and its surrounding countryside.

It was an instant hit, even when placed against the rough-and-tumble of The Professionals, and led in the 1980s to a multitude of non-action, regional detective dramas, from Inspector Morse to The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. When Eve decided to leave the series after two years, Stewart devised the relaxed and equally successful Jersey-based Bergerac (1981-91), starring John Nettles, to take its place.

The son of a master printer who also performed as a Pierrot clown, Robert Stewart was born in Edinburgh in 1931, and attended Moray House, where he won a Burns essay prize. That led him to submit stories to local newspapers, and at 15 he began work as an office boy at the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch.

After National Service, he started writing plays and worked as a radio commentator before returning to the Evening Dispatch as their youngest ever news editor, then working as a foreign correspondent on Illustrated magazine.

Adding his mother's maiden name of Banks to his own to differentiate himself from another writer, by the early 1960s he had arrived in television. It was an ideal place and time for his talents, and he was soon writing furiously for series such as Danger Man, The Avengers, Callan, The Human Jungle and The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre. By 1966 he was also a producer, on the now forgotten espionage drama, Intrigue.

He came to the rescue of Thames Television in 1976 to write and produce a series that had fallen seriously behind schedule, Rooms. This was one of a number of impressive daytime dramas of the period (others included Couples and Crown Court) which had more in common with the lunchtime theatre of the era's flourishing Fringe movement than with throwaway soap opera.

In a different vein again, he wrote two of the very best Doctor Who series, creating the wonderful Zygons for "Terror of the Zygons" in 1975, which placed Tom Baker's Doctor in Stewart's native Scotland, and then excelled himself with "The Seeds of Doom" the following year, about as perfect an offering from Doctor Who as you could wish for, although with Stewart's crime drama background and the director and half the cast of The Sweeney on board, it was also incredibly violent and drew complaints not just from Mary Whitehouse, but also from parents and children, one complaint being that "you've turned Doctor Who into Thriller!", referring to ITV's fearsome series of suspense plays popular at the time.

Having giving television executives a taste for gentle, non-metropolitan storytelling with Shoestring, he produced another Sunday-night hit for the BBC in Lovejoy (1986-94), tales of a roguish antique dealer (Ian McShane) set amid the handsome and rarely trumpeted Essex countryside. In 1991 he launched ITV's latest slice of English pastoral, The Darling Buds of May, based on the novels of HE Bates and starring David Jason and then-unknown Catherine Zeta Jones (Stewart had a superb eye for casting).

Jukes of Piccadilly (1980) was a charming children's thriller series about a tea shop owner (Nigel Hawthorne) who does a little sleuthing on the side. Another off-key detective was the focus of Call Me Mister (1986), while another piece of escapist charm was Hannay (1988), a series of Edwardian mysteries with Robert Powell reprising the role of John Buchan's dashing hero which he had played in the film The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978). In a seedier vein was Timothy Spall as a show business promoter in Frank Stubbs Promotes (1993), an example of Stewart always looking to subvert genres where he could, and find fresh settings and focuses.

His television work slowed up in later years but he certainly didn't, publishing his first novel, the thriller The Hurricane's Tale, when he was 81. To the delight of his many admirers in fan circles, he also wrote a memoir, To Put You in the Picture, which was published last year. He captured wonderfully a life well-lived making some of the finest examples of the sort of television that the industry once looked down upon and on which it now thrives.

Robert Stewart (Robert Banks Stewart), writer, script editor and producer: born Edinburgh 16 July 1931; twice married (both marriages dissolved; one daughter, three sons); died Twickenham 14 January 2016.