Richard Harris

Richard Harris (born 26 March 1934) is a London-born British screenwriter and playwright, most active from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. He wrote primarily for the crime and detective genres, having contributed episodes of series such as The Avengers, The Saint, The Sweeney, Armchair Mystery Theatre, and Target. He has helped to create several programmes of the genre, including Adam Adamant Lives!,<ref>"Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67)", BFI Screenonline.</ref> Man in a Suitcase, and Shoestring. Despite a career that has been largely spent writing for the crime and detective genre, in 1994 he won the prize for best situation comedy from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain for Outside Edge, a programme he had originated as a stage play.Outside Edge, bbc.co.uk. Accessed 19 January 2023. Although the majority of his work has been for television, a substantial amount of his output has been for the stage. Career Harris began writing freelance episodes for British television in his mid-twenties. His first sale was to Sydney Newman's 1960 ITV series, Police Surgeon, for which he wrote the final episode, "The Bigger They Are". Although he wrote for the initial runs of The Avengers and The Saint, much of the early 1960s was dominated by his contributions to anthological mystery programmes like The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre. His attempts at comedy in the early 1960s, largely collaborative efforts with Dennis Spooner, including an episode of Tony Hancock's unsuccessful 1963 series for ATV, failed to establish either writer in the genre. According to Mark Lewisohn, their two failed pilots for Comedy Playhouse proved the two men were really more interested in writing dramatic works.