Charlotte Bingham, who has died of cancer aged 83, enjoyed successful careers as both a novelist and a television scriptwriter. She wrote a bestselling autobiography, Coronet Among the Weeds, when she was just 20, about her life as a debutante, and followed it with dozens of romantic novels, as well as screen comedies and dramas co-written with her husband, Terence Brady.

One of the couple’s earliest successes – and their own creation – was the sitcom No, Honestly (1974-75), starring John Alderton and Pauline Collins as a couple from across the social divide, Charles Danby (“CD”), a jobbing actor, and Clara Burrell, a peer’s scatty daughter seeking to supplement her husband’s meagre income by dabbling with writing. It drew inspiration from their own lives – Brady acted as well as writing and Bingham came from an aristocratic family and used her skill with words to make a living.

No, Honestly was Bingham and Brady’s breakthrough after they had been out of work for six months and were preparing to dispose of their home on the edge of London and change lifestyle. “It sold everywhere and went to the top of the ratings,” recalled Bingham. “Television was highly paid in those days. For a script, you would get £1,000 – 10 times as much as an advance for a novel.”

The couple later contributed scripts to Thomas & Sarah (1979), a series spinning off the characters played by Alderton and Collins in the period drama Upstairs Downstairs, for which they also wrote (in 1971 and 1972). The collaboration continued when, in 1989, Bingham and Brady created and wrote the first series of Forever Green, featuring Alderton and Collins as townies moving to the countryside.

Again, there was an element of autobiography, with Bingham and Brady having relocated in the 1980s from Richmond upon Thames to rural Somerset to live in an 18th-century rectory with paddocks for their horses.

The couple presented a raunchy version of that country lifestyle when they adapted Jilly Cooper’s “bonkbuster” novel Riders into a 1993 television miniseries.

Bingham was born in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, during the second world war, to parents who both worked for MI5. Her mother, Madeleine (nee Ebel), was a playwright and historical biographer. Her father, John Bingham, became a bestselling author of crime fiction and succeeded as the 7th Lord Clanmorris when Charlotte was a teenager. As a section head with the security service, he was one of the inspirations for George Smiley, the intelligence officer in thrillers by John le Carré, a colleague at MI5 who also credited Bingham with encouraging him to write his first novel.

Aged three, Charlotte was farmed out briefly to her paternal grandparents in Northern Ireland, whose family home, Bangor Castle, she described as “frightfully Upstairs Downstairs”, then to her maternal grandparents in London, before her mother resumed parenting duties when she was seven.

Nevertheless, she boarded for the next nine years at the Priory of Our Lady of Good Counsel school in Haywards Heath, close to rolling downs – landscapes that would provide the backdrop to many of her novels. Alongside the wrench of being parted from her parents came the shock that “the headmistress’s idea of punishment was to beat you with a hockey boot”.

Bingham said she was brought up in a postwar world of rationing and few luxuries, adding: “My books are full of heroines who go up into the attic to try to transform old clothes.” She wrote her first novel at the age of 10 and, on leaving school six years later, lived in Paris – with a family of aristocrats on the Left Bank – with the aim of improving her French.

Aged 18, she was recruited by her father to work as a secretary for the security service in London – a role she first publicly revealed in her 2018 book MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks – while spending her evenings writing Coronet Among the Weeds (1963), her humorous account of being a young woman in high society searching for a “real”, not a “weedy”, man. She was celebrating finishing the book by having a drink at the Ritz hotel when she was spotted by a literary agent, who signed her up and sold it to Heinemann.

She switched to fiction and in 1966 had her first success with Lucinda, described by the Daily Express as “a pleasantly lunatic little volume about the comic ventures of a virginal young lady”.

She had married Brady in 1964 and told their story in a second autobiographical book, Coronet Among the Grass (1972).

Their first TV collaboration was writing many episodes of the Take Three Girls comedy-drama (1969-71), with Liza Goddard as one of the trio of flat-sharers. Later, they reworked No, Honestly as Yes, Honestly (1976-77), with Donal Donnelly playing a struggling songwriter and Goddard as his typist and wife-to-be. Goddard was then the “other woman” when the pair created another sitcom, Pig in the Middle (1980-83), starring Dinsdale Landen as the man torn between her and his wife.

The lure of Hollywood, when Bingham and Brady were flown to Los Angeles to write an American version of Pig in the Middle titled Oh Madeline (1983-84) and starring Madeline Kahn, was tainted by having their scripts being constantly rewritten by others.

As well as Take Three Women (1982), a sequel to Take Three Girls, Love with a Perfect Stranger (1986), an adaptation of Pamela Wallace’s novel, and Father Matthew’s Daughter (1987), a series starring James Bolam as a Roman Catholic priest becoming the guardian of his dead sister’s child, Bingham and Brady’s television work included scripts for the sitcom Robin’s Nest (in 1978) and the period drama Nanny (1981-83). They switched to theatre to adapt The Shell Seekers novel for a 2003-04 tour.

Bingham’s romantic fiction titles included The Business (1989), Change of Heart (1994, the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s novel of the year), Country Wedding (1999) and The White Marriage (2007), series such as Love Quartet (1983-93) and The Bexham Trilogy (2002-03), and the two-part Nightingale Saga (1988, 1996).

Her final memoir, Spies and Stars: MI5, Showbusiness and Me (2019), included further stories of her time in MI5, and an account of her romance with an actor whom she referred to only as “Harry”.

Brady died in 2016. Bingham is survived by their daughter, Candida, and son, Matthew, two grandchildren, and her brother, Simon.

• Charlotte Mary Thérèse Bingham, writer, born 29 June 1942; died 16 November 2025