Mervyn Haisman
British television writer (1928-2010)
Mervyn Oliver Haisman (15 March 1928 – 29 October 2010) was a British screenwriter of film and television. Prior to this career he worked as an actor and managed a theatre company as well as working in insurance.
Biography
Haisman was born in 1928 in London. An early television credit was an episode of Dr. Finlay's Casebook (1967) called The Forgotten Enemy. At about the same time he formed a writing partnership with Henry Lincoln, and together they were the authors of three 1960s Doctor Who stories during the Patrick Troughton years: The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and The Dominators. The latter script was their last contribution to the programme and, after disagreements with the production office, it was cut by an episode and credited to the pseudonym Norman Ashby. Haisman and Lincoln also worked together on episodes of Emergency Ward 10, but their writing partnership ended in the mid 1970s.
Haisman also wrote for many British television shows including The Onedin Line (on which he also worked as script editor), Howards' Way, and Swallows and Amazons Forever!; and on the horror movie Curse of the Crimson Altar, also known as The Crimson Cult (1968), again with Henry Lincoln.
Haisman provided script for the popular BBC series Jane (1982), starring Glynis Barber as the wartime comic strip pin up.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6352190. VIAF identifies the subject as 169259952. The Library of Congress control number is nb2012003146. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 2010, 1967 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mervyn Haisman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.