In 1989 he became Head of Drama and Arts at Tyne Tees Television and was Executive Producer of the early Catherine Cookson adaptations, which ran on ITV with great success for a further decade or more.
[2] His first credit on television was the ITV mini-series “Act of Betrayal” about an IRA super-grass on the run in Australia, co-written with his friend and former LWT colleague Nicholas Evans (author of The Horse Whisperer and other novels).
In 1994, having just completed the acclaimed ITV mini-series Dandelion Dead directed by Mike Hodges and starring Michael Kitchen, about the notorious Hay on Wye poisoner Herbert Armstrong, Chaplin became a full-time writer and since then has chalked up many credits across various genres.
Chaplin created and wrote all 13 plays in the much loved series “Two Pipe Problems” (2006–2013) about life in a retirement home for faded theatricals with a Sherlock Holmes trope, starring Richard Briers and Stanley Baxter.
The latter featured photographs by Karen Atkinson, idiosyncratic maps by artist Birtley Aris and an extended essay by Michael Chaplin on the social history of SW Durham, his father's so-called ‘heartland’.
Chaplin also worked as a co-writer of “Tommies”, a four-year project for BBC Radio 4 telling the story of the First World War from the point of view of a group of British Army signallers.
The series, starring Alun Armstrong as retired pitman Joe Snowball and Deborah Findlay as Durham University philosophy lecturer Hermione Pink, ran for 13 plays and proved very popular with listeners.
“For The Love of Leo”, a bittersweet comedy drama starring Mark Bonnar and set in Edinburgh (where Chaplin and wife Susan lived for five years), began running on Radio 4 in 2019 and was recommissioned for a further two series.
He was a writer-in-residence for the Port of Tyne from 2010 to 2015 and has served on the boards of various cultural organisations in the North-East, including Live Theatre, the Tyneside Cinema, the writers’ development agency New Writing North and the Amber/Side Trust.