Tony Marchant's early work, which depicted the lives of the disenfranchised young in London's urban underclass, excited audiences and critics alike. Plays such as The Lucky Ones (1982), for which he received the Most Promising Playwright award from Drama magazine, characterize the vibrancy and promise of his early writing. This promise has been developed and fulfilled most completely in his work for television, dating back to the popular and critically acclaimed Take Me Home (1989).

Marchant received the Royal Television Society Writers Award/Best Drama Serial Award and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts's Best Drama Serial Award for Holding On (1997). This eight-part dramatization of lives in contemporary London places him in a line of left-wing dramatists for British television that includes Dennis Potter, David Mercer, and John McGrath.

Marchant was born into a working-class family in East London on 11 July 1959. He is married and has three sons...