Richard Spendlove
British screenwriter
Richard Spendlove MBE is a British radio presenter/producer and television writer.
Life and work
Spendlove worked for British Railways for 35 years, and in 1963 was appointed Relief Station Master at Ely in Cambridgeshire. He retired from the railways in 1989 at the age of 50, to pursue a career in broadcasting.
With David Croft he wrote and created a BBC TV comedy series, Oh, Doctor Beeching!, which ran on BBC One between 1995 and 1997.
From 1989 until 2017, Spendlove worked for BBC Local Radio as the host of his long-running Saturday night music and phone-in show, which was simulcast from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire and also broadcast on the Eastern Counties radio stations, Radio Norfolk, Radio Suffolk, Radio Essex, BBC Three Counties Radio, Radio Northampton and Radio Kent. In January 1994, an Early day motion tabled in the House of Commons after a break in its broadcasting received a total of fifteen signatures. It was believed to be the longest running phone-in chat show on British Radio.
Spendlove was awarded the MBE for "Services to Regional and Local Radio Broadcasting" in 2000.
In 2016, the BBC was critical of his use of his show to gain support for a convicted Royal Marine murderer.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Richard Spendlove” is british screenwriter. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Richard, Spendlove and British, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7329184. VIAF identifies the subject as 101445383. The Library of Congress control number is nb2009025578. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1989, 1995 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Spendlove” 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.