As a writer, my brother Graeme Curry, who has died of a brain tumour aged 61, was best known for a controversial 1988 Doctor Who script. As a singer, his countertenor voice was regularly heard on recordings of early music.
Graeme was commissioned to write the Doctor Who adventure after winning a writing competition with Over the Moon, a radio play about racism in football. The Happiness Patrol, with Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, was set on a planet where it was compulsory to be happy; the unhappy were liquidated. The episode had a noisy afterlife when McCoy said in 2010 that the show had had an “anti-Thatcher agenda”: Sheila Hancock’s portrayal of the planet’s ruthless leader, Helen A, was an obvious reference. During the 1980s, Graeme also wrote scripts for The Bill and EastEnders, and for the Radio 4 serial Citizens.
Graeme was born in Padstow, Cornwall, the son of Jennifer, a writer, and John, an air traffic controller. From Dauntsey’s school in Wiltshire he won a choral scholarship to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he read English. He was involved in the university’s musical scene, including the ambitious production of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in the city’s Corn Exchange directed by his university contemporary Nick Hytner.
He sang and recorded with a range of early music choirs, including the Tallis Scholars, the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Concert Choir, La Chapelle Royale and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chorus. John Tavener was present during the recording Graeme made with the Academy of Ancient Music of Tavener’s Eternity’s Sunrise. He also “depped” in cathedral and church choirs, including St Paul’s Cathedral, Brompton Oratory, the Savoy Chapel, St Margaret’s, Westminster, and more recently Ely Cathedral.
Following the breakup of his 1986 marriage to the singer Tessa Bonner, he turned to theatre for a period, working as a stage manager at the Nuffield theatre, Southampton. Then, while continuing to write, he worked for a series of educational organisations, including the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and Trinity and Cambridge International examination boards.
His later works included a BBC radio play, PS I Love You (1997), about a lost Beatles acetate disc, starring Philip Jackson and Celia Imrie, and The Mantle of the Earth (2000), about the Victorian nature artist Marianne North. He also collaborated with the composer Jonathan Rathbone on Christmas Truce, writing a text based on letters from Great War soldiers and the work of the poet Edward Thomas, killed in the war. The centenary of the truce in 2014 was marked by a performance of the work in the cathedral in Ely, where Graeme then lived.
He is survived by his daughter, Laura, from his first marriage, and by Susan Robinson, his long-term partner, whom he married a few days before his death.
