A PIONEER OF BROADCASTING

David McVey investigates the life and career of an early television writer

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Talking Pictures TV has a deserved reputation for unearthing lesser-known British films, and for breathing new life into British television drama and comedy series of the 1950s to 1970s. One of the series that has featured is the earliest English-language television version of Maigret, the 1960-63 BBC version starring Rupert Davies.

If you enjoy checking out the credits of old TV series – and who doesn’t? – you’ll notice that several episodes are credited to a female writer, Margot Bennett. In all, Bennett contributed seven episodes between 1960 and 1962.

As Talking Pictures TV has revived forgotten British film and television, the British Library’s publishing division has been doing a similar rescue job with classic British crime fiction. I was recently reading one of these, The Man Who Didn’t Fly, written by the same Margot Bennett in 1955. It’s a cracking story about an aeroplane that’s lost at sea. Four passengers were booked on the flight, but only three turned up. Who were the three who perished? Who was the one who survived – and where is he?

Margot Bennett, then, succeeded in at least two areas of writing, including one in which women were rarely given opportunities in the 1950s and 1960s. However, after reaching the end of The Man Who Didn't Fly (and no spoilers from me), I returned to the beginning and read Martin Edwards's introduction and learned that Bennett had been born in 1912 in Lenzie in what’s now East Dunbartonshire. Lenzie is effectively the prosperous end of my home town of Kirkintilloch; why had I never heard of Margot Bennett?