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David Peter Renwick is an English television writer, best known for creation of the sitcom One Foot in the Grave and the mystery series Jonathan Creek.
Before beginning his full-time comedy writing career, he worked as a journalist on his home town newspaper, the Luton News.
On beginning his comedy career, he initially worked in a team with writing partner Andrew Marshall, the pair of them providing material to popular sketch shows such as The Two Ronnies and Not the Nine O'Clock News during the late 1970s and early 80s. One of the most celebrated sketches he wrote for the former was a parody of the BBC quiz programme Mastermind, where a "Charlie Smithers" chose to answer questions on the specialist subject "Answering the question before last", adapted from his "Answering one question behind all the time" sketch from their The Burkiss Way for BBC Radio 4. Their short-lived LWT series for ITV, End of Part One, was an attempt to transfer Burkiss-style humour to television. Later in the 1980s they also wrote for the sketch show Alexei Sayle's Stuff and Spike Milligan's There's a Lot of It About.
In 1982 they penned the comedy drama serial Whoops Apocalypse for LWT, based on the insanity of international politics in the age of nuclear weapons, and four years later they adapted the screenplay into a feature film version. In 1983 they wrote The Steam Video Company for Thames Television, a short comedy series based on very silly parodies of famous novels. This was followed in 1986 by Hot Metal for LWT, a six-part satire of the tabloid newspaper industry starring Robert Hardy, Geoffrey Palmer and John Gordon Sinclair. The show was a critical success and returned for a further six episodes in 1988 with a revised cast of Robert Hardy, Richard Wilson and Caroline Milmoe.
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