First job: Holiday job at 16 as assistant to Jack Tinker on the Brighton Evening Argus. Interviewed Hayley Mills and Roy Boulting on preview of In Search Of The Castaways.

2nd job: Orson Welles' char. (Really!). Needed money when I was at film school and got a job cleaning Orson Welles' London home for ten shillings an hour.

1st published piece: A news cutting I sent to Private Eye in 1965 about US inventor Reuben Tice, who was killed when a machine he had invented for de-wrinkling prunes exploded.

Television
Began in Canada, 1970, writing daily 1/2 hour tv programme for pre-schoolers, Polka Dot Door. (This show is still running). Graduated to writing science programmes, particularly computing and space exploration, then started own film company, Quadrant Films, which became Canada's largest independent feature film production company during the 1970s

Films
1971-78: Full time involvement through jointly-owned production company, Quadrant Films, in writing, producing, financing and distributing movies, mostly in Canada and US. These included:

• Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things
  (Dir. Bob Clark)
  
• Dead of Night
  (Lynn Carlin and John Marley. Dir. Bob Clark)
  
• Sunday in the Country
  (Ernest Borgnine & Michael J Pollard)
  
• The Neptune Factor (Ernest Borgnine, Ben Gazzara, Walter Pigeon and Yvette Mimieux. Dir Dan Petrie. Prod Sandy Howard)
  
• Blue Blood (Oliver Reed and Derek Jacobi)
  
• Malachi's Cove (Donald Pleasence)
  
• The Blockhouse
  (Peter Sellers, Charles Aznavour, Jeremy Kemp)
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time
  (Isaac Hayes and Stephanie Powers)
  
• Find The Lady (Mickey Rooney, Peter Cook and Alexandra Bastedo)
  
• Spanish Fly (Terry Thomas and Leslie Phillips)

  We also had investments in:

• Deranged (Roberts Blossom, dir Bob Clark)
  
• Under Milk Wood (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
  
• Shivers (Ivan Reitman/David Cronenberg)
  
• Blood Orgy of the She-Devils
  
• I Dismembered Mama
  
• The Corpse Grinders

I sold my shareholding in Quadrant in 1979 to concentrate on a career as a novelist, although I took time out to co-produce Biggles (Peter Cushing, Alex Hyde-White, dir. John Huff) in 1985. The film had a Royal Premiere in the presence of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

In 1993 I co-founded Pavilion Internet plc, one of the first Internet Service Providers in the UK, which we sold to Easynet in 1998.

In 1997, together with producer and music writer James Simpson I co-founded Ministry of Vision Ltd, a film and television development company. MOV is currently developing Donors, a $20m four-hour drama series about the world trade in human organs in partnership with Dustin Hoffman, and China 2008, a major 10-part documentary series about the impact on life in China of the forthcoming Chinese Olympics, and has recently created Murder Mansion, a 13-episode reality drama for USA Network.Its highly successful 6-part entertainment reality series, Hypnosex, made for Channel Four is currently now in production in the US and in development in France.

In partnership with Sony, MOV has recently produced the 10-episode series Time Travellers for network ITV, and in partnership with Objective Television is currently in production on an 8-episode comedy show it has devised, Bedsitcom, for Channel Four - and also has this show in development in the US and Scandinavia. MOV has a number of films in development both in the UK and the US, principally through Ministry of Vision, detailed in the Film Production section of this biography.

[Read more: I. Biography and interests III. Film Production]