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Peter Tinniswood | | Gordon House, Head of Radio Drama, writes:
Peter Tinniswood was one of Radio's finest and most imaginative writers. His plays were prose-poems; often wickedly funny but rooted in truth and structured like musical scores. He wrote novels, stage and television plays, but radio was his great love, and many of the extraordinary comic characters he first created in novels - Uncle Mort in A Touch of Daniel, Winston in Hayballs were later triumphantly brought to life on radio.
Peter loved language; he loved yoking together the most improbable combinations of ideas and images, and he loved the simplicity of radio - his favourite medium. He once said to me that he wrote for other media to subsidise his radio work. And a brilliant ear for dialogue coupled to a wonderfully comic sense of humour, bordering on the absurd, made him one of our great radio dramatisits. He wrote more than fifty radio plays, writing leading roles for some of our greatest actors; Billie Whitelaw, Maurice Denham, Robin Bailey, Michael Williams, Stephanie Cole, Peter Sallis, Peter Jeffrey and Judi Dench all starred in one or more "Tinniswood originals"; and when Judi was asked by an interviewer why someone so in demand should be appearing in a World Service radio play, she replied "when you're offered a starring role in a play by Peter Tinniswood, you don't say no."
The great inspiration of Peter's later working life was his second wife, the actress , Lizzie Goulding. When Peter was diagnosed with cancer in the neck, - which would lead to a laryngectomy - it was Lizzie who gave him the emotional and practical support to continue writing. And in these last years Peter wrote some of his finest plays including The House Swap, The Admiral of the Night, The Last Obit, Anton in Eastbourne and - still to be produced - The Goalkeeper's Boo-Boo. Always the first to see the irony of his situation, Peter wrote that losing his voice had - by some mysterious alchemy - enabled him to find it. His final plays have a depth and comic darkness which reveal a man writing in the shadow of death.
We shall all miss Peter immensely. Radio Drama has lost a brilliant writer; I personally mourn the loss of a wonderfully funny and inspirational friend with whom it was always a privilege to work.
Gordon House
 Listen to Front Row's tribute to Peter Tinniswood.
Listen to Front Row's review of Peter Tinniswood's last play Anton in Eastbourne.
Awards:
Authors Club Award, 1969,
Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize,
Royal Society of Literature, 1974, for I Didn't Know You Cared,
Welsh Arts Council Prize, 1974. | |
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