Everything about David Renwick totally explained
David Peter Renwick (born
4 September 1951 in
Luton,
Bedfordshire) is an
English television writer, best known for creation of the
sitcom One Foot in the Grave and the mystery series
Jonathan Creek
Before beginning his full-time comedy writing career, he worked as a journalist on his home town newspaper, the
Luton News.
On beginning his comedy career, he initially worked in a team with writing partner
Andrew Marshall, the pair of them providing material to popular sketch shows such as
The Two Ronnies and
Not the Nine O'Clock News during the late
1970s and early
80s. One of the most celebrated sketches he wrote for the former was a parody of the BBC quiz programme
Mastermind, where a "Charlie Smithers" chose to answer questions on the specialist subject "Answering the question before last". They also wrote
The Burkiss Way for
BBC Radio 4, occasionally accompanied by other writers on early episodes. Their short-lived
LWT series for
ITV,
End of Part One, was an attempt to transfer
Burkiss-style humour to television. Later in the 1980s they also wrote for the sketch show
Alexei Sayle's Stuff and
Spike Milligan's
There's a Lot of It About.
In
1982 they penned the comedy drama serial
Whoops Apocalypse for
LWT, based on the insanity of international politics in the age of
nuclear weapons, and four years later they adapted the screenplay (changing most of the characters and situations completely) into a
feature film version. In
1983 they wrote
The Steam Video Company for
Thames Television, a short comedy series based on very silly
parodies of famous
novels. This was followed in 1986 by
Hot Metal for
LWT, a six-part satire of the tabloid newspaper industry starring
Robert Hardy,
Geoffrey Palmer and
John Gordon Sinclair. The show was a critical success and returned for a further six episodes in 1988 with a revised cast of
Robert Hardy,
Richard Wilson and
Caroline Milmoe.
Renwick began writing solo in
1990 when he created the sitcom
One Foot in the Grave, starring
Richard Wilson, which was highly successful and went on to be a popular hit for the following decade. It also ran for four seasons as an American re-make entitled
Cosby, starring
Bill Cosby, although this is generally regarded as a poor adaptation of the original.
In
1997, Renwick devised the comedy-drama
Jonathan Creek, based around the crime-solving abilities of the eponymous designer of magic tricks, played by comedian
Alan Davies. As of
2004, twenty-six episodes have been produced across four short run series and two Christmas specials. The slow rate of production is partly due to Renwick's writing of the episodes, which he describes as being a painstaking process taking him several months to establish all of the intricacies of the plots, and yet, the fourth and so far final series was poorly received due to plots including a police officer keeping a Bible in a box.
He has also written for 'straight' television drama, contributing episodes to
ITV's famous
adaptations of
Agatha Christie's
Hercule Poirot mysteries, starring
David Suchet. In 1992, Renwick and co-writer Michael Baker received an
Edgar Award from the
Mystery Writers of America for the Poirot episode "The Lost Mine", which aired in the U.S. as part of the
PBS anthology series Mystery!.
Most recently, another comedy-drama Renwick has penned, entitled
Love Soup, starring
Tamsin Greig and
Michael Landes, premiered on
BBC One on
27 September 2005. Renwick, and his ex writing partner Marshall, had cameo roles in an episode of the series as members of a television sitcom scriptwriting team.
Further Information
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