David Sale

David Sale, born Ernest Swindells (Manchester, 1932 ) is an English-born author, television screenwriter, playwright, producer, director, actor and journalist.

Born as Ernest Swindells in 1932 to an aircraft factory worker and his wife Lucy, (he even named the popular Number 96 character of Lucy Sutcliffe, played by Elisabeth Kirkby, after his mother) he grew up in Manchester during the years of World War II, before taking to professional writing under the pseudonym of David Sale.

He is perhaps best known as creator, writer and script editor of the highly influential television soap opera Number 96.

Before that, he was Executive Producer of the satirical weekly comedy The Mavis Bramston Show.

Both of these series were highly rated in their day and still rank amongst the most famous and influential programs to have appeared on Australian television.

He also wrote the scripts for short-lived serial The Group.

His first two novels, written between TV assignments, were Come to Mother and The Love Bite.

He emigrated to Australia in 1950, and has contributed to many TV drama series, and provided special material for Australian entertainers.

These were published in London in hardback in the 1970s and both were bought by Hollywood.

Come to Mother was made into the television film Live Again, Die Again (1974).

Television interrupted this flow of books, but in the 1990s Sale resumed his career as an author with Twisted Echoes (1993) (Hodder Headline); Scorpion's Kiss (1995) (Pan Macmillan) and Hidden Agenda (1996) (Pan Macmillan).

A later book is the memoir "Number 96, Mavis Bramston and Me" (Vivid Publishing)) plus an audio version read by the author (Bolinda audio).

He later tackled musical theatre for the first time with his co-written (book and lyrics) version of Sumner Locke Elliott's novel Careful, He Might Hear You.