How playwright Patrick Hamilton hit bullseye with The Archers

Hamilton’s name is back in the headlines as The Archers draws on Gaslight for its latest sensational storyline

For 20 years, attempts have been made to promote Patrick Hamilton as more than a literary also-ran. There have been fanfares around the Penguin Modern Classics reissues of his novels, the TV adaptation of his 1929-34 trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, the noughties London revivals of his hit plays Gaslight and Rope (respectively better known, tellingly, in screen form as “the Ingrid Bergman film” and “Hitchcock’s one-shot masterpiece”) and Nigel Jones’s 2008 biography. But it has taken a posthumous stint as secret scriptwriter for The Archers to put him back in the headlines.

It is one of his plots rather than Hamilton himself that has made news, however. The Times’s Libby Purves, Mumsnet posters and newspaper letter writers have all pointed in recent weeks to the debt owed to Gaslight by the radio soap’s protracted domestic abuse storyline. This week it sensationally saw Helen Titchener stabbing her obnoxious husband, Rob, providing front-page fodder for the Mail, Times and Telegraph.

Related: How The Archers became a Shakespearean saga of fate, betrayal and family ambition

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