The Canadian-born producer Sydney Newman was in charge of Armchair Theatre between September 1958 and December 1962 during what is generally considered to have been its best era and produced 152 episodes.
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Hugely popular at its peak, with audiences occasionally touching an astounding twenty million, Armchair Theatre was an important influence over later programmes such as the BBC's The Wednesday Play (1964–70), a programme initiated by Sydney Newman after he had moved to the BBC.
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He wrote more than thirty original plays for television, from episodes of Armchair Theatre to later works including The Charmer (1987) and A Perfect Hero (1991).
Titled No Trams to Lime Street (1959), the Liverpool-set piece was presented in ABC Television's Armchair Theatre anthology strand, for which Owen continued to write plays into the 1960s.
In 1958, already established in Jamaica, Reckord appeared in the Ted Willis play Hot Summer Night at the New Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London, with Andrée Melly as his white girlfriend; a later Armchair Theatre adaptation the following year concentrated on the couple's relationship.
As well as ELO, he has collaborated musically with Lynne on many projects, among them songs for the Electric Dreams soundtrack, Lynne's solo album Armchair Theatre and Lynne produced Dave Edmunds' Information.
As well as published works he was a successful TV writer with credits for Coronation Street and Hine as well as one-offs for the prestigious Play for Today slot on the BBC's main TV channel (Michael Regan and The Vanishing Army), two episodes for The Man Outside (Drama series, BBC 1972) and several plays in Thames TV's Armchair Theatre series.