Jude Tindall, the television dramatist, who has died aged 60, brightened viewers’ afternoons with soothing doses of murder and mayhem as the BBC’s “queen of cosy crime”; she wrote several episodes of Father Brown and devised its spin-off The Sister Boniface Mysteries, and was also co-creator of the equally gentle Shakespeare and Hathaway.
Jude Tindall accepted that her work would never receive the critical plaudits or awards showered on self-consciously “edgy” crime dramas, but happily described her programmes as the television equivalent of “a cup of tea and a biscuit”. The corpses were never permitted to obscure the beauty of the picturesque rural settings in her shows, and she admitted that they functioned as “an advertisem*nt for the English tourist board”.
She was a late addition to the script team for the first series of Father Brown in 2013 after another writer dropped out, but cosy crime proved to be her métier and she became one of the series’ most prolific writers. It proved the ideal vehicle for her warm, gently subversive wit, and her interest in the themes of tolerance and redemption.
Loosely inspired by GK Chesterton’s mystery stories and starring Mark Williams as a 1950s Catholic priest cum sleuth, Father Brown has become an international hit, with the 11th series broadcast this year. Although it is a fixture of the BBC’s afternoon schedule, Jude Tindall liked to emphasise that, in most of the 200 plus territories it was sold to around the world, it is shown in primetime.
In the first episode she wrote she introduced a sleuthing nun, Sister Boniface (played by the comedian Lorna Watson), who stole the show from Father Brown and was not permitted to return by the producers. Jude Tindall eventually resurrected the character in her own series.
The Sister Boniface Mysteries – the first episode of which in 2022 saw a woman asphyxiated in the lucky dip at a village fete – became another hit, with a fourth series currently in production. Jude Tindall’s aunt, a nun, serves as religious consultant.
The inspiration for the Vespa-riding Sister Boniface, a forensic consultant to the police in the pretty town of Great Slaughter, was one of Jude Tindall’s former teachers, Sister Agnes Bartels, who had been a surgeon and squadron leader in the RAF and later a research fellow at the University of London.
Colleagues attested that she also drew on herself for the character. “Sister Boniface in many ways was Jude in a wimple – endearing machine-gun chatter and a razor-sharp intelligence,” noted the BBC Studios executive Neil Irvine.
Judith Mary Tompkinson was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, on January 17 1964, the daughter of Mary, a teacher, and Michael, an engineer. Her father’s work made for a peripatetic childhood, with spells in Northern Ireland, Wales, Iran (whence she was evacuated due to the Revolution) and Saudi Arabia. In her teens she boarded at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Woldingham, Surrey, sowing the seeds for Sister Boniface.
She studied History of Art at the University of St Andrews and went on to be an advertising account executive at Bartle Bogle Hegarty. In 1989 she married Mark Tindall, and gave up work after the birth of her first child.
As she approached her 40s she sought a new challenge and entered a BBC competition for budding writers to supply a script for one of her favourite programmes, Casualty. (She observed that, unlike many people who work in television, she actually loved watching it).
Although she did not win, her entry caught the attention of the producers of Doctors, the BBC’s afternoon soap opera. She wrote more than 40 episodes from 2003, discovering that light, comical storylines were her forte.
Once ensconced on the Father Brown team, she also achieved her ambition of writing for Casualty, and in 2021 adapted Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost as a serial for US television, starring Anthony Head.
With Paul Matthew Thompson she also created Shakespeare and Hathaway, which featured Jo Joyner and Mark Benton as a pair of private eyes in Stratford-upon-Avon and became another afternoon favourite on the BBC, running for four series from 2019. There was less emphasis on murder, with a typical case featuring a dog being kidnapped after being bequeathed a fortune.
A forthright personality who did not suffer fools gladly, Jude Tindall was also an inspiring mentor and adviser, and a doughty campaigner for improving writers’ pay. She donated generously to the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain welfare fund to help struggling writers during the pandemic.
She is survived by her husband and their daughter and two sons.
Jude Tindall, born January 17 1964, died August 4 2024
