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Photo: John Fuller
Garry has been writing and making drama in a variety of media for 40 years. His work ranges from hard-hitting plays and documentaries to comedies, musicals and magical family shows.
His best-known stage play is perhaps the much-revived Frankie and Tommy (Lyric, Hammersmith; Liverpool Everyman) about his father’s ill-fated post-war comedy double-act with Tommy Cooper. Other plays include Wicked, Yaar! (National Theatre) and Mohicans (Donmar Warehouse). His acclaimed musical adaptation of The Secret Garden played to 75,000 people at Leeds Playhouse and Birmingham Rep.
His television work includes the Decisions trilogy, which he wrote and produced for Channel 4, winning a Royal Television Society award, and Britain’s First Suicide Bombers, a feature-length drama-documentary for BBC 2, nominated for a Prix Europa. He has written single dramas and numerous episodes of popular series such as The Bill, Soldier Soldier, Heartbeat and Children’s Ward.
For children, he worked on five seasons of the Bafta-nominated comedy franchise The Worst Witch, which has been screened in more than 60 countries including on HBO in the USA. He also developed Dopplegangers, an animated cartoon series commissioned by Entertainment Motion Pictures, Los Angeles.
His more recent credits include Amazonia starring Rory Kinnear and Michelle Dockery for BBC Radio 3, and two pieces of documentary theatre about the demise of the Yorkshire coalfield, The Last Seam (Cast in Doncaster) and Blow Down (Theatre Royal Wakefield/Leeds Playhouse).
Garry served on the Board of Trustees at Theatre Royal Wakefield 2019-23, and is currently on the board at Queens Hall Arts, Hexham. He has twice been nominated for Writers Guild of Great Britain awards.
Background
Garry grew up in south-west London, the son of a sheet-metal worker and primary school teacher. He studied English at York University, trained as a journalist with The Guardian group newspapers in Surrey, and went onto a masters degree in Drama at Leeds University Workshop Theatre. In the 1980s he was resident playwright with Major Road Theatre Company and director of the Theatre in the Mill, Bradford before turning to freelance writing.
Career
While writing for television in the early 1990s, Garry also worked for the National Theatre’s education unit. He was producer of drama and documentaries for Chameleon Television 1995-8 and developed projects for the company for many years after that. He was visiting lecturer in screenwriting at the Northern Film School and in 2003 became Leeds University’s first lecturer in scriptwriting. In 2013 he was awarded a Humanities Fellowship to research screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Photo: Robling Photography