John Stevenson (I)

John Stevenson obituary

Scriptwriter who wrote 447 episodes of Coronation Street and created the sitcoms Brass, The Last Of The Baskets and How's Your Father?.

Mother's Ruin (Granada), a farce set in a health food shop, is like a clip round the ear with a wet herring. It makes you roll your eyes a bit. Apart from Roy Barraclough, punting away with his foot to keep the thing afloat, and his assistant Brucella (Julia Deakin) - so aptly named after bacteria and a martyr to sinusitis - I would consider this half an hour of my life lost. A sensation which often sweeps over me at bus stops.

It is, however, the sort of passionate cry that people in Brass (Granada) cry passionately. It is a poor Brass actor who does not insist on his quota of passionate cries per page.

Spectres of far more horrific half hours haunt the fringes of my memory. It had a nicely matched pair in Arthur Lowe as a portly butler, and Ken Jones as a beery peer. And when John Stevenson has exhausted all the comic possibilities in the name Basket which he must have done in the first instalment, it will leave room for better and less predictable jokes.