Born: 19th December 1915
Died: 18th March 2003 (aged 87 years)
Episodes Broadcast: 1975

London-born Lewis Greifer was orphaned while still a teenager, and was thereafter raised by his grandmother. He had just embarked on a career as a reporter when he decided to join the Royal Air Force, shortly before the start of World War Two. During military service in Palestine, Greifer met his future wife, Nan; they were married in 1947. He returned to journalism after demobilisation, and also began writing for radio. Greifer moved into television in 1957, with early works including Five Names For Johnny and The Voodoo Factor. He turned his 1959 thriller, The Man Who Finally Died, into a 1963 film with Stanley Baker and Peter Cushing. Other movie screenplays included Cash On Demand (1961, also featuring Cushing) and the musical comedy Up Jumped A Swagman (1965).

Greifer maintained a busy writing career during the Sixties, contributing to shows like Ghost Squad, Emergency -- Ward 10 and The Prisoner. His scripts were sometimes credited to the pseudonym “Joshua Adam”, a reference to his two sons. Greifer also created the anthology series Love Story and the mystery programme Who-Dun-It, and spent much of the decade as a script consultant for ATV. He began lecturing on television drama, including stints at Birmingham University and Regent Street Polytechnic.

Greifer's career started to wind down in the early Seventies. He wrote for programmes such as Special Branch and New Scotland Yard and, in 1974, he was invited to contribute to Doctor Who by Robert Holmes, a former ATV colleague who was now the show's script editor. Greifer began writing Pyramids Of Mars, but his work was delayed by a serious illness and subsequent surgery. When Greifer was finally able to complete a set of initial drafts, Holmes found them unsuitable for production. However, Greifer was now working in Israel, where he held a teaching post at Tel Aviv University, complicating the process of revising Pyramids Of Mars. Holmes had little choice but to rewrite the scripts himself, and they were credited to the pseudonymous “Stephen Harris”. This was Greifer's last contribution to television. He died on March 18th, 2003.