STREAMING services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime spoil us with a plethora of veritable television shows, but do you remember BBC TV series’ in the 1960s and 70s such as Compact, R3, Dixon of Dock Green, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, The Expert, The Brothers, Colditz or Secret Army?

Southampton born Norman James Crisp, known by his initials and surname, NJ Crisp, was a prolific and versatile television writer, dramatist and novelist. He penned a good number of scripts, including those above.

His 1996 play That Good Night starred Donald Sinden and Nigel Davenport.

Crisp’s 1987 psychological thriller book Dangerous Obsession became a London stage play and was filmed in 1999 as Darkness Falls, starring Ray Winstone. However, Crisp was so unhappy with the end result that he insisted on having his name removed from the final print.

Bringing alive the sometimes unexciting world of business, by focusing on the trials and tribulations of the people who make the cogs turn, was a hallmark of NJ Crisp’s long career as a successful writer for television.

The Brothers followed the squabbles resulting after three brothers inherited part of their father’s haulage firm – the eldest had expected to have it to himself – and the old man’s secret mistress was also bequeathed a share in it. The family-business saga proved compulsive Sunday-evening viewing, attracting audiences of up to 11 million.

NJ Crisp served in the RAF then went through a string of jobs - taxi-company manager for Southampton’s Streamline Taxis, Marks and Spencer management trainee and typewriter salesman.

He had a television play, People of the Night, about a radio cab company, broadcast by the BBC in 1957. This encouraged him to go full-time as a writer in 1959 and he subsequently wrote a dozen plays for the BBC, including The Dark Man in 1960, about a taxi driver facing problems at work, before deciding the future was in series and serials.

As a result, he wrote scripts for the BBC soap opera Compact, set in the offices of a women’s magazine, then editor on R3, a drama about the professional and private lives of research scientists.

He was one of several writers recruited for ten years to Dixon of Dock Green to rid the popular series of its “cozy” image by writing “tougher” scripts.

Also writing for Dr Finlay’s Casebook, in one episode he tackled the taboo subject of euthanasia. In 1968 Crisp co-created The Expert which followed the day-to-day activities of a forensic scientist, Dr John Hardy, played by Marius Goring. It was the first BBC2 drama series to be made in colour.

A prolific Crisp also wrote scripts for Colditz in the early 1970s, the wartime prison-camp drama; Oil Strike North in 1975, about the crew and their families on a North Sea oil rig and Buccaneer in 1980, a series about a small air freight company.He also scripted the feature-length TV drama The Masks of Death in 1984, starring Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and John Mills as Dr Watson, and the horror film Murder Elite, featuring Ali MacGraw.

Crisp published several novels including The Brink, In the Long Run and The Ninth Circle.

In 1985 he wrote the play Fighting Chance set in a residential rehabilitation centre for neurological patients and based on his own illness. He had a malformation of the spinal cord which left him partially disabled. Failing eyesight also led Norman to be registered blind in the 1980s.

A founding member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain in 1959, he later served as its chairman and won a Writers’ Guild screenwriters award in 1968.

Crisp negotiated the first £1,000 fee to be paid to a writer for a television drama, he also persuaded the ITV companies to make a pension contribution with each script commissioned.

Norman Crisp lived in Abbot’s Way, Highfield, was married to Marguerite and had three sons and a daughter.

Crisp passed away on June 14, 2005, at the age of 81.

By Martin Brisland, tour guide with SeeSouthampton.co.uk.