| Activity | Clive Exton, born Clive Jack Montague Brooks, was a screenwriter, known especially for the ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot, ‘Jeeves and Wooster’, and ‘Rosemary & Thyme’.
His early days were working on ITV's Armchair Theatre productions.
His first television play, 'No Fixed Abode', was transmitted by Granada Television in 1959.
He then contributed to Sydney Newman's Armchair Theatre series.
He also wrote The Boundary (1975), with Tom Stoppard, for the BBC's experimental series The Eleventh Hour.
In 1975 and 1976, he adapted four of Graham Greene’s short stories for episodes of 'Shades of Greene' presented by Thames Television. Most of this early work is now lost.
However, Exton also wrote 'Stigma', the 1977 episode of the BBC's 'A Ghost Story for Christmas', and ITV Playhouse's 1979 adaptation of M. R. James's 'Casting the Runes', both of which survive.
Exton moved away from the single play and initiated series such as ‘Killers’, ‘Conceptions of Murder’ and ‘The Crezz’, a depiction of Notting Hill life in the 1970s.
He also contributed, under the pen name M. K. Jeeves, two episodes to the first season of Terry Nation's ‘Survivors’ for the BBC.
In Hollywood, he co-wrote ‘The Awakening’ (1980), an adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel ‘The Jewel of Seven Stars’, and the action-adventure ‘Red Sonja’ (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1985), and, uncredited, contributed to ‘The Bounty’ (with Sir Anthony Hopkins, 1984) before returning to Britain.
Returning to England in 1986, Exton found that the television business had radically changed. This including rise of independent producers such as Brian Eastman, of Carnival Films.
For Carnival Films, Exton wrote most of the episodes (20) of Agatha Christie's ‘Poirot’, with David Suchet (1989–2000), all of the episodes (23) of ‘Jeeves and Wooster’, with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry (1990–1993), and ten episodes of ‘Rosemary & Thyme’ (2003–2006).
He also dramatised works by Jean Cocteau, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon and H. G. Wells, for television.
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