New commissioning editors, with new commissioning techniques which rigorously excluded outside submissions unless plays were “challenging” or “realistic” or “socially aware” (as though such themes had never been pursued before), tended to view writers such as Bradnum as ?tist, hopelessly unfashionable and, in John Drummond’s chilling phrase, “tainted by experience”.Ironically, Bradnum’s last broadcast play, The Terraced House (1994; director, Jane Morgan) was a perfect little 30-minute vignette of tension and horror which touched on child-sex abuse; his last adaptation that of John Fowles’s roaring best-seller The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1993, in three parts; Janet Whitaker), with David Threlfall and Amanda Redman as the doomed lovers, and Norman Rodway as the Mephistophelean narrator. Both hardly the work of an ?tist.Frederick Bradnum was born in 1920 in Fulham, south-west London, his father (who before the First World War had led an adventurous life as a wandering cowboy in Canada) a senior clerk at Battersea power station. The family moved to Roehampton, where Bradnum left school at 15 to work in an architect’s office, becoming (after night-school) a junior draughtsman at the local council. He wrote poetry on the side and joined the Territorials, serving with the BEF in France on the outbreak of the Second World War, and then with Special Forces in Norway.He was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in December 1940. With the Commandos he served in Greece (shepherding minor royals off Crete, he said, on one of the last boats out) and took part in raids on Norway and the French coast. Wounded during a raid on St Nazaire in May 1942, he spent several hours in the water and was considered permanently unfit for general service.

After seven months in hospital he was given a staff job, and spent the rest of the war in an administrative role in SOE, and then in Central Archives. He emerged from the conflict an Acting Major at 26, but was to draw on his wartime experiences in one or other fictional form for the rest of his life.After the war Bradnum helped launch the “48 Theatre” in London before joining the BBC, working his way up through the ranks (at one time on the road with Wilfred Pickles). A long stint as producer followed (1950-61), mainly for the old Third Programme, then the leading cultural voice in the civilised world.Bradnum took to studio production like a fledgling to flight, swiftly mastering studio techniques and within the shortest time possible producing, directing, adapting, writing. With the blind actor Esme Percy (a noted Shavian) he put out a season of Shaw plays; solo he adapted half a dozen plays by the poet W.B Yeats.

He was attracted to the poetic – strong influences on his own early work were the verse dramas of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry (his own contributions to the Third’s massive retrospective From the Fifties in the autumn of 1961 were productions of The Cocktail Party and A Sleep of Prisoners). He adapted Auden (For the Time Being, with music by Malcolm Arnold), Shaw (a much-praised Back to Methuselah) and Lorca, directed Ibsen and Strindberg, and indulged in his fancy for 16th- and 17th-century Spanish dramatists by producing plays by Calder?Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina. He also produced/directed two major “Classic Serials”, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad’s Romance and Disraeli’s Coningsby.In the mid-1950s, together with the radio producer (and friend of Beckett) Donald McWhinnie and Desmond Bristow, he tentatively began what would later become the celebrated BBC Radiophonic Workshop, writing the first – probably only – radiophonic poems, of which Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957), with the voices of the actors Frederick Treves, Joan Sanderson and Andrew Sachs (all then young bloods) mixed in with electronic music and random electronic sound-patterns, was the most successful.In 1961 Bradnum suffered a breakdown brought on by a combination of pressure of BBC work and his memories of the war. He left London, diving into the deepest Sussex countryside, and almost at once decided to pursue a solo writing career. For the next three decades he wrote almost exclusively for the radio, during what may fairly be regarded as the drama department’s “golden years”.

It was a period of brilliant writers, electrifying productions, hugely creative directors, wonderfully distinctive radio voices. Even the trash had points of interest.Bradnum’s masterpiece in the adaptations line was his 26-hour dramatisation of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, produced by Graham Gauld at intervals over a period of four years (1979-82) and utilising a stellar cast of radio voices. His adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s The Riverside Villas Murder (1976; Harry Catlin) was both funny and poignant. He transformed a number of Simenon’s seemingly unbroadcastable Maigret novels (1977, with Maurice Denham as the eponymous Chief Inspector) into riveting playlets, and – the writer Rene Basilico having already nabbed the good stuff: Tinker, Tailor, Smiley’s People, etc – even managed to make something of le Carr? overblown and rambling The Honourable Schoolboy (1983, two parts; Roger Pine, with Martin Jarvis as Jerry Westerby, Peter Vaughan as Smiley).