HAVING a single number one rated show would be enough for most writers.

But that is child's play compared to the achievements of Worcester's John Watkins.

John penned hit sitcoms in England, Australia, Canada and Germany in an extraordinary career, that spanned three decades, and believes he is the only person to have a number one ranked programme in those four countries.

The unassuming former Christopher Whitehead College and RGS Worcester student has an even more amazing back story.

Multi-talented John served as a military policeman in Germany after the Second World War, as a PC in Evesham, and drew cartoons that featured in national newspapers.

Not bad for someone who couldn't attend university, as his family didn't have the resources to allow to him to.

"I sometimes wonder how I did all of this," he said.

"Most of the time they gave me a job to do and I did it.

"Considering I left school at 16 it was quite amazing I did all these things.

"When I was a boy, life was very tough, it was hard going.

"I was pretty isolated as a boy so became resilient and that escapism was really important."

When he left school at 16, John followed one of his friends to become a police cadet.

After a spell at police HQ in Worcester, he signed up to the Military Police and was posted to Dusseldorf.

He returned to the UK for three months of intensive training for the Special Investigation Branch of the force and ended up in Bielefeld.

John spent three years in Germany, before heading home to a new role as as a police constable in Evesham.

This proved something of a culture shock.

"In Germany I was armed with a pistol and had to round up one or two Nazi war criminals.

"I had an exciting job then I moved to Evesham and I got so bored and I couldn't stand it."

He moved on to work as a rep selling soap for Procter and Gamble, before becoming a rep at Lombard Bank in Wolverhampton.

On a family holiday to Butlins in the early 70s he ran into a cartoonist convention, where he "learned the cartoonists were not just making money from cartoons but also from writing comedy for TV".

He thought 'I'll have a got at that', left his job at Lombard and jumped headfirst into a career writing sitcoms.

This started when John wrote one episode, which led to him having a series commissioned.

"I rang up Thames TV and they said if I could get down there in an hour and a half with a good idea they might give me a chance.

"On the way I made something up and got work on Bless This House with Sid James, who was a great bloke.

"He loved the scripts and said 'give this man the rest of the series because he knows what he's doing.' "

Perhaps John's most famous work was No Place Like Home, which "was based on some of my own experiences with four kids who were growing up and in their teenage years.

"That ran for 50 episodes and was on the BBC.

"After that, I was considered a safe bet to do a sitcom series."

Work continued to flow in the 1970s, until he got the surprising call to write a sitcom for German TV at the end of the decade.

John explains: "The Germans decided they wanted to do situation comedies so they imported stuff from the UK like Fawlty Towers and put subtitles on.

"They came over and asked my agent if he knew anyone who could do an original series, and he said he did - me.

"My German was reasonable but not quite good enough to write scripts in German.

"The concept of No Place Like Home was universal so the series was based on that, written in English but a Germanified version of English.

"That was the first German sitcom as far as I know and it went down very well."

That success led to further work in Germany writing, before John was called to help out on Canadian TV during a writers' strike, as bosses "were looking for somebody to continue with the series" that was number one.

He wrote episodes for the three months the strike lasted and it remained the most watched.

Then he also did a version of Father, Dear Father for our cousins Down Under - which also reached number one in the telly charts.

His highlight though, remains writing something that chimed with the peculiar German sense of humour.

"I think what I achieved on German TV for the Germans, who don't have much of a sense of humour, was probably the highlight."