Hazel Adair (Hazel Joyce Willett), writer and producer, born 9 July 1920; died 22 November 2015. British soap opera pioneer who helped create Crossroads, Compact and the UK's first daily soap Sixpenny Corner,In 1964, she and Peter Ling devised Crossroads based on an idea he had after driving past a board advertising the opening of a motel. Reg Watson, a producer at the ITV company ATV, was finally given the green light.Noele Gordon, an actor who had become a star in the ATV Midlands region through presenting magazine and chatshows such as Lunch Box, was cast in the lead role of Meg Richardson. The soap was launched as a daily serial, Monday to Friday, in the ATV Midlands region on 2 November 1964, and other areas took it up over the next eight years. It ran for 24 years Adair, whose association with Crossroads had ended by the mid-70s, was born Hazel Willett in Darjeeling, India. Her father, Edward, worked in Calcutta as an engineer during the Raj. He and his wife, Ada (nee Rhames), returned to Britain when their daughter was nine months old, and divorced in 1923. Two years later, Alma married Edward Hamblin.
After leaving Woodridings school, Hatch End, Middlesex, Hazel achieved her ambition to act, changing her name to bring her to the top of alphabetical lists. She appeared in many stage plays, and in 1940 married Gordon Mackenzie, a rancher from Brazil. He returned there after the second world war, and they divorced in 1949. They had a son, Colin, who as a journalist tracked down Ronnie Biggs in Brazil in 1974.
During the war, Adair worked as an ambulance driver, an experience she later recalled in her 1983 novel Blitz on Balaclava Street, written under the pen name Clare Nicol. She continued to act and had small roles in the film My Brother Jonathan (1948) and the BBC television drama Lady Precious Stream (1950). Adair wrote two series, At Your Service, Ltd (1951), with Robert Tronson, and Stranger from Space (1951-53), with Marriott.She also became a scriptwriter on the weekday radio serial Mrs Dale’s Diary, This led her to create, with Antony, ITV’s first soap opera, Sixpenny Corner (1955-56): the first on British television to run five days a week, it followed the community living around a garage run by the newlywed Nortons, Bill and Sally (Howard Pays and Patricia Dainton), in the fictional rural district of Springwood.
From 1957, when the hugely popular Emergency – Ward 10 was launched, Adair wrote episodes of the hospital serial. For a 1964 story, she scripted one of UK television’s earliest interracial kisses, four years before the first on US television between Kirk and Uhura in Star Trek. She also co-wrote the spin-off film, Life in Emergency Ward 10 (1959), and the 1961 comedy Dentist on the Job.
Also a writer for magazines, Adair had the idea for Compact (1962-65), a serial based in the world of magazine publishing. She and Ling devised the twice-weekly BBC soap, which starred Jean Harvey as the editor, Joanne Minster, who was replaced after six months by Ronald Allen as Ian Harmon. Adair pushed the boundaries again by creating the first regular black character in a British programme – the photographer Jeff Armandez (Horace James) in 1964 – and featuring an unmarried mother.
She ran the Writers’ Guild with Denis Norden. In 1967, Adair and Ling devised Champion House (1967-68), a BBC drama series about a family-run textile firm.She set up Pyramid Films with Kent Walton and, using the credit Elton Hawke and other pseudonyms, produced sex comedies such as Virgin Witch (1972) and Keep It Up Downstairs (1976). She stepped outside the genre to make the 1979 thriller Game for Vultures, starring Richard Harris and Joan Collins.
An unproduced Doctor Who script she wrote with Ling, Hexagora, was eventually adapted by Paul Finch and recorded as an audio story released on CD in 2011.
