Shortly before his death from cancer aged 69, Dave Sheasby sat in a hospice bed with a borrowed laptop to complete his radio script for A Month in the Country, based on JL Carr's sharp and rueful novel of Yorkshire life and art. Following Sheasby's acclaimed dramatisations of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On the Western Front (2008) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (2009) for the same producer, David Hunter, it completed a late flowering as an adapter of literary fiction for Sheasby, a diffident radio producer and playwright who probably never knew how well he was respected.
Sheasby was born in Fulwood, a village between the edge of Sheffield and the fields and moors of the Mayfield valley. The son of a building engineer who had worked on the city's neoclassical library, he was educated at King Edward VII school, where he was a county-standard cross-country runner. The only time he lived outside Sheffield was when he went to the London School of Economics to read history, soaking up French new wave cinema in his spare time.
After training as a teacher, he returned to Sheffield to work in a school in a poor area of the city. In 1967, the BBC recruited a mixture of inexperienced local talent and experienced broadcasters from elsewhere for the launch of its local radio stations. Sheasby was given the job of education producer at Radio Sheffield.
Michael Barton, the station's first manager, recalls that Sheasby dramatised his visits to Sheffield landmarks so effectively and hilariously that – although originally made for children – the programmes were re-broadcast for adults. These included an extended conversation with a parrot in the city's botanical gardens. If that sounds whimsical, it wasn't. Sheasby's writing was precise, unsentimental and usually rooted in observed life, but it also had an element of fantasy.
At Radio Sheffield, Sheasby helped to develop other writers when tiny sums of money were found by the BBC or by the short-lived South Yorkshire county council. He combined generous support for those who wanted to write, regardless of ability, with rigorous judgment of what should be broadcast. The children's writer Berlie Doherty was among those who found her voice when seconded to his office, and the poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan made his radio debut at Sheasby's instigation.
Local radio interest in formal education programmes gradually declined, and by 1988 Sheasby was at Radio 4. He continued to find new voices to bring to a network more used to the sound of the home counties, Ambridge or Manchester, just as the novelist Barry Hines and film director Ken Loach were bringing harder accents to other media. These voices included the actor Fine Time Fontayne, who played a barber cutting Picasso's hair in one of three Sheasby plays inspired by the artist's visit to Sheffield for the 1950 peace conference. Trimming Pablo, first seen in 2002, is still performed by Fontayne as a stage play and is in the process of being filmed.
Sheasby's comedy was fuelled by an underlying anger at inhumanity. His stage play Skoiled (1980) introduced the Sheffield pronunciation of "schooled" to audiences at the Crucible theatre, alongside some uncomfortable social and educational truths. Voice, the story of a late-night radio presenter with a penchant for the self-destruct button, was seen at the Edinburgh festival in 1982 and transferred to television as Night Voice, featuring Alexei Sayle, in 1990.
Welcome to the Times (1985), a redundant steel worker's arraignment of corruption, also went from radio to television. Apple Blossom Afternoon, which won a Giles Cooper award (then considered the radio drama Oscars) in 1988, reflected Sheasby's passion for betting on horses. The same subject resurfaced in his comedy series for Radio 4 (1997's One Flat Summer). Recording at the BBC's Maida Vale studios on Derby day, Sheasby gave the cast a tip which resulted in a collective profit of £200.
For Radio 4, Sheasby wrote comedy series about incompetent and unglamorous private detectives (1989's The Blackburn Files, with McMillan and Martyn Wiley) and a barbershop quartet (Sunny Side Up, 2000). When radio work dried up, he found employment as a Royal Literary Fund fellow at the universities of Leeds and Warwick and took summer jobs at a garden centre before his "rediscovery" through adaptations. He had a natural empathy with Remarque's interest in the humanity of the ignored classes (in this case, ordinary German soldiers) in All Quiet On the Western Front. The savage comedy of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five corresponded to his own gift for laughter and pessimism in harness.
Sheasby married twice. His first wife, Helen Grainger, died from a brain tumour in 1976. In 2004, he married his longterm partner, Eve Shrewsbury. He is survived by her and his six children, three from each marriage.
David Blunkett writes: Diffident and understated Dave Sheasby certainly was, but he also had talent which, had he resided in London, would have been sung from the rooftops. My entry into broadcast, like his, was at the dawn of local radio, as Radio Sheffield took to the airwaves in 1967. From that point, our paths crossed, often with me requesting recordings of programmes missed, or sending congratulations. Trimming Pablo was one of those which I just caught on Radio 3 by accident. Hardly anyone in Sheffield knew that Picasso had visited.
He was constantly bringing to light the tremendous heritage, humour and culture of my home city. Let's hope that the BBC repeats some of the gems – including one extended Saturday Play, about the leader of a council who bore a striking resemblance to my predecessor and his infatuation with the gurus of the "24-hour city" and their promises of investment. Dave Sheasby will be missed – not only by those who knew him, but also by those who never knew his name, yet were captured by his talent.