For two years during the Second World War, he worked in a coal mine as a "Bevin Boy", before moving into repertory theatre as an assistant stage manager.

[citation needed] By the late 1950s, however, Owen was beginning to realise that his real ambitions lay in writing rather than performing, and he began to submit scripts to BBC Radio.

His first full-length play, Progress to the Park, was produced by the Theatre Royal, Stratford East following its radio debut, and later in the West End.

Titled No Trams to Lime Street (1959), the Liverpool-set piece was presented in ABC Weekend TV's Armchair Theatre anthology strand, for which Owen continued to write plays into the 1960s.

[5][6] He also won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain 1961 Best Original Teleplay award for The Rose Affair,[7] which in 1968 was adapted as a television opera with music by Norman Kay.

[citation needed] His 1974 play Lucky was a rare television representation of Britain's new multicultural reality and described a young black man's (Paul Barber), search for identity.