Last modified on Mon 15 Mar 2021 14.22 EDT
Betty Willingale, who has died aged 93, was one of the pioneers of British television drama. As a BBC script editor from the 1960s onwards she brought the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola and DH Lawrence to small-screen serials.
Later, as a producer, she had success in turning modern literature into popular television with the BBC’s big-budget Fortunes of War (1987), Alan Plater’s adaptation of Olivia Manning’s novels, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as newlyweds caught up in the aftermath of Hitler’s advance across the eastern front, and ITV’s long-running detective whodunnit Midsomer Murders (from 1997), based on Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels.