Name Philip Purser | Role Novelist | |
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Books Insect‑Eating Lizards, Bearded dragons, Corn & Rat Snakes, Good Snakekeeping: A Compr, Quick & Easy Green Tr | ||
Philip Purser (born 28 August 1925) is a British television critic and novelist.
Purser was born in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. His mother had been the first female student of an art school in Sheffield, and later worked as a postcard artist in the style of Mabel Lucie Attwell. His father had a varied career after service in World War I, eventually working for Tarmac in Liverpool from 1934 when the family settled in the Wirral Peninsula. (Purser had an older sister, Rozanne).
A contributor to the News Chronicle in the 1950s, he was television critic of The Sunday Telegraph from its launch in 1961 until he was sacked in 1987 by Peregrine Worsthorne, the then editor. Purser has also co-authored three editions of Halliwell's Television Companion (1982, 1986, originally Halliwell's Teleguide 1979) and wrote a TV film The One and Only Phyllis Dixey (Peek-A-Boo) on the wartime erotic entertainer for Thames in 1978. A biography of Dixey (co-authored with Jenny Wilkes) was published in the same year.
In recent years Philip Purser has contributed obituaries to The Guardian. His wife is the crime writer Ann Purser; they have two daughters and one son.