2008 BRITISH Soap Awards Montage

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Kevin Laffan


Kevin Laffan, who has died aged 80, was the man behind the ITV series Emmerdale, Britain's second-longest running soap opera after Coronation Street.

Set in the fictitious village of Beckindale in the Yorkshire Dales, Emmerdale, originally entitled Emmerdale Farm, began as a twice-weekly lunchtime experiment on November 16 1972, for an initial 13-week run. The show was an immediate success and went on to become the first five-nights-a-week television soap. Renamed Emmerdale in 1989, it now boasts a regular audience of 10 million viewers.

Emmerdale's current form bears little resemblance to the original series, which Laffan conceived as a realistic portrayal of life in a farming community, centred round the Sugden family and its matriarch Annie Sugden (played by Sheila Mercier), who struggles to make a go of the family farm after the death of her husband Jacob. Laffan's scripts were bold from the start. The first episode began with Jacob Sugden's funeral, a device which enabled Laffan to introduce all the characters in the drama.

But Laffan became increasingly disenchanted with producers looking for what he called "sex, sin and sensationalism", and he eventually walked out in 1985 after 262 episodes. Subsequently, the pace of life in Emmerdale speeded up, with an aeroplane disaster, kidnappings, robberies, crimes of passion and affairs of the heart.

Not that Laffan was prudish about such matters. His play It's a Two Foot Six Inches Above the Ground World (1969), about an Irish Roman Catholic family and their struggles to cope with the Pope's encyclical about birth control, carried the health warning: "It may not be for those who could find a frank discussion of sexual and religious matters not to their taste." Another play, The Missionary and Other Positions (Etcetera, Camden Town, 1994), was about exactly that.

The third of 14 children, Kevin Barry Laffan was born at Reading, Berkshire, on May 24 1922, into a devout Irish Roman Catholic family. It was not an easy childhood. The family moved to Walsall where Kevin's father, a disabled itinerant photographer, could not earn enough to pay the bills. The family was eventually evicted and sent to the workhouse, a fate the 12-year-old Kevin claimed to have avoided by jumping off the bailiff's lorry as it passed through the gates.

As a result of this experience, Laffan was strongly in favour of birth control and critical of the Church whose strictures on the matter, he felt, had contributed to the family's problems. "I am a product of my father's belief in God rather than his belief in sex," he said. He was taken in by an elderly actress who allowed him to sleep in her kitchen. She told him "if you want to be serious, make them laugh". So he joined the Theatre Royal, Bilston, aged 14, as a call boy and progressed through the ranks to become a stage manager and then an actor and director.

In the early 1950s, Laffan returned to Reading to run his own company at the Everyman Theatre. When the theatre was taken over by the council seven years later, he moved to Bognor, then Ilfracombe, for the summer repertory seasons.

By this time, he was establishing a name as a playwright, first under the name Kevin Barry, then as Kevin Laffan. His Zoo, Zoo, Widdershins Zoo (1968), about young drop-outs living in a Birmingham attic, won the first prize for new plays at the 1968 National Union of Students Drama Festival and was staged at Nottingham Playhouse in a production starring Lynn Redgrave.

It's a Two Foot Six Inches Above the Ground World, which starred Prunella Scales in a production at the Bristol Old Vic, moved to the Wyndham Theatre and was later turned into a film, The Love Ban, starring Nannette Newman and Hywell Bennett.

By now Laffan had acquired a reputation as a writer for television, scripting the Castle Haven series for Yorkshire Television (1969); Bud (1963), a series about Bud Flanagan; and Beryl's Lot (1973-77), a comedy drama about a cook determined to improve her lot in life. He also co-wrote, with Peter Jones, the sit-com I Thought You'd Gone (1984), about parents who move to a smaller house in the country in the mistaken belief that their children have left home.

Laffan's television plays included Decision to Burn (1971) and The Best Pair of Legs in the Business (1968), which was later remade into a feature film starring Reg Varney as an ageing holiday camp drag artist. He also contributed scripts to the espionage series Man in a Suitcase (1967); Kate (1970); the courtroom drama Justice (1973) and The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries (1992).

His later plays for stage included Never So Good (1976), an unlikely tale about black squatters in London being visited unexpectedly by a terrorist with a bomb; and Adam Redundant (1989), a play set in the Garden of Eden in which Satan is cast as the hero.

Laffan published his first novel in 2001. He called it Pendle's Disposal, but could not find a publisher; so he changed the title to Virgins are in Short Supply and had two offers in a week.

Laffan, who died on March 11, was married to Jean Thompson; they had three sons.