Despite winning a mock trial in front of a high court judge while still an undergraduate, resulting in an offer of excellent chambers to begin a career at the bar, he chose to try his luck in show business.
For three years he supported himself by freelance journalism, mainly for The Observer, for which he wrote book reviews and conducted “Arts” interviews with subjects including Peggy Ashcroft, Robert Bolt, Neil Simon, Harold Pinter and Alec Guinness.
In early 1968, a few weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday, he was hired to re-write the entire script of a Roman epic which was about to start shooting in Romania under the direction of Hollywood veteran Robert Siodmak, and with a cast headed by Laurence Harvey, Orson Welles, Sylva Koscina and Honor Blackman.
In addition to many single plays, he contributed to popular series such as “Colditz”, “Justice”, “Hadleigh”, “Public Eye”, “Oil Strike North”, and “Orson Welles Great Mysteries”.
In 1977 he wrote the fake documentary “Alternative 3”, an only slightly tongue-in-cheek story about an international effort to escape a doomed Planet Earth and establish a survivors’ colony on Mars.
In a way reminiscent of the scare caused by Orson Welles’s radio spoof, War of the Worlds in 1938.” Many viewers took it to be the literal truth and telephoned TV stations, newspapers and even government offices in alarm.
He went on to work with a number of Hollywood Golden Age stars in their later careers, including Richard Widmark, David Niven, Joseph Cotten, James Mason, and in particular Kirk Douglas, for whom he scripted The Final Countdown (1980).
Also in Australia, in 1982, his script “A Dangerous Summer” (co-written with Kit Denton, Quentin Masters and Jim McElroy) was shot starring James Mason and Tom Skerritt.
Directed by Robert Enrico and Richard Heffron, with an international cast including Peter Ustinov, Klaus-Maria Brandauer, Sam Neill, Claudia Cardinale, Christopher Lee and Jane Seymour, it was one of the biggest projects ever mounted in Europe.