Al Hunter Ashton

Alan Hunter (Al Hunter Ashton), actor and writer: born Birmingham 26 June 1957; married (two sons, one daughter); died High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire 27 April 2007.

Al Hunter Ashton worked in front of and behind the television cameras for a quarter of a century. As a writer, he was a regular contributor to series such as EastEnders, Casualty, The Bill and Holby City, but he gained his greatest satisfaction from writing the screenplay for Alan Clarke's TV film about football hooliganism, The Firm (1988), starring Gary Oldman.

On screen, many will remember Hunter Ashton in six series of London's Burning (1996-2001) as Pitbull, the loudmouthed, thuggish firefighter. This followed similarly unsympathetic roles as the alcoholic slob Ray Grice in 108 episodes of Crossroads (1986-88) and Colin Long, one of the armed robbers in Emmerdale (1994) who staged a bungled raid on the post office and fled to the moors.

Born Alan Hunter (he later changed his name by deed poll to Al Hunter) in Birmingham in 1957, he wrote scripts for his own amusement from the age of 15 but, on leaving school, followed in his father's footsteps by taking a job in a Longbridge car plant. He worked in his spare time as a stand-up comedian in clubs for £15 a night but became a stripper on discovering that he could earn the same amount for shedding his clothes every evening."My stripping routine was actually funnier than my stand-up one," he said.

Then, Hunter was able to pursue the career he really wanted at Manchester Polytechnic's School of Theatre and Television (1975-78), where Willy Russell and Dave Simpson were writers in residence. After graduating, he wrote a play that was sent by Simpson to BBC Manchester and became Hunter's first broadcast work.

His first professional acting work was with a Theatre In Education company in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, and he was subsequently cast in Willy Russell plays such as Breezeblock Park (Liverpool Playhouse) and Blood Brothers (Derby Playhouse). Russell also later commissioned him to write the BBC Schools television play Teaching Matthew (in which Hunter also had a small role as a policeman, 1985), a satire on Russell's own Educating Rita.

Although he wrote as Al Hunter, he became Al Ashton for acting work (he was in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, when he had to make the decision) because there was another actor of the same name. In more recent years, he combined the two to become Al Hunter Ashton.

Television roles began to come his way in programmes such as Angels (1982) and Juliet Bravo (1982), before he became known as Ray Grice in Crossroads. At the same time, Hunter Ashton was a scriptwriter for the rival BBC soap EastEnders, beginning in 1986, just a year after its launch. Over the next 20 years, he contributed to episodes that included storylines such as Dirty Den's adultury, Phil Mitchell being shot and Tiffany's death.

A lifelong Birmingham City supporter, Hunter Ashton tried to weave football into every script he wrote, even if it was just a character mentioning the game in passing. He followed The Firm - winner of the 1990 Prix Europa and based on a previous radio play of his - with another major, one-off drama, Alive and Kicking (1991). Lenny Henry, who played a recovering drug addict in the television film, had seen The Firm and read an article about a Scottish football team of dried-out addicts, and asked Hunter to write the new script. The drama also featured Robbie Coltrane in the role of a therapist.

Hunter Ashton's other significant works for television as a writer were Safe (1993), a harrowing tale of homelessness which won the 1994 Bafta TV Award as Best Single Drama, and White Goods (which he co-directed with Robert Young, 1994), a black comedy starring Lenny Henry and Ian McShane. He also wrote the BBC series The Broker's Man (1997-98), starring Kevin Whately as Jimmy Griffin, a former policeman working as an investigator for insurance companies, with a role for himself as Jimmy's right-hand man, Vinny Stanley, a gentle giant.

"I always play loudmouth bullies, thugs or psychopaths," said Hunter Ashton. "I am never a nice person. The only time I have played a nice person was when I wrote myself a part in Broker's Man. I was a big softie."

Anthony Hayward

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