[citation needed] Terson was educated at Heaton Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne, and carried out national service with the Royal Air Force between 1950 and 1952.
[citation needed] Plays such as Zigger Zagger, about football hooligans and their pursuit of drink, sex, and trouble, and The Apprentices, showing the cruelties between young men learning industrial trades, presented a dismal view of life with few means of escape.
[6] Works for television often took a more optimistic view, especially a trilogy of Plays for Today centring on a trio of Yorkshiremen, led by Art (Brian Glover), and their humorous misadventures.
Terson treated the situation of men dealing with life in the modern de-industrialized North in the play Strippers which ran in London's West End theatres.
Terson was a prolific writer: over eighty of his plays have been performed and there is a vast catalogue of unperformed scripts at the Victoria Theatre archive at Staffordshire University.