Ted Willis
His serial epic about a plodding London police officer, "Dixon of Dock Green, " enthralled TV audiences every Saturday night for the British Broadcasting Corp. from 1955 to 1976.
His son John said his father died from a heart attack at his home in Chislehurst.
Willis became Lord Willis in 1963 when he was given a life peerage in recognition of his achievements: he created 41 TV serials, wrote 37 stage plays and the scripts of 39 feature films as well as radio scripts and a dozen novels.
Willis used Dixon's introductory catch line, "Evening all," for the title of his second volume of autobiography in 1991.
Willis brought Dixon back from the grave after the character was created and then killed in a 1949 cops-and-robbers movie called "The Blue Lamp."
By turning a police officer into a hero, Willis annoyed some of his friends on the political left who had given him his chance in the early 1940s when he wrote for London's Communist-run Unity Theater.
Willis was a Londoner, the fourth of five children of a working-class family. He was an early pioneer of scripts about ordinary people, known in Britain as kitchen-sink dramas, but he was never a rebel like playwright John Osborne and the other "angry young men" of the 1950s.
"I am not angry enough. I can get angry over issues, but apart from Hitler, I don't think I've ever hated anyone in my life," he said.
Asked how he thought up so many plots he said: "I've never had writer's block in my life. I've a demon that drives me. I've enough ideas to keep me going until the day I die. If I don't write my seven pages of foolscap a day in pencil -- I'm a bit of a technophobe -- I'm really out of sorts," he said.
He is survived by his wife Audrey and two children. Funeral arrangements were not announced.
