Alan Hackney, who died on 15 May, 2009, aged 84, was a British writer of screenplays and novels whose best known work was the quintessential satire I'm All Right Jack.

The class comedy starred Peter Sellers as the quixotic union steward Fred Kite, a man who dreams about the Soviet ideal of “miles of cornfields and ballet in the evening”, and Richard Attenborough as the conniving businessman Sidney De Vere Cox.

The 1959 film was made by director-producer team John and Roy Boulting and was adapted from Hackney’s novel Private Life. An earlier Boulting satire, Private’s Progress (1956) was also based on one of his books and both centred around the hapless Stanley Windrush played by Ian Carmichael.

Alan Charles Langley Hackney was born on 10 September, 1924, in Manchester into a middle class family. His Manchester University education in economics was interrupted by an army call-up and it was during his service that he started writing satires on his army colleagues, in particular the upper class officers.

After a posting in India, he resumed his studies at Oxford under the tutelage of Isaiah Berlin in 1947. He began submitting sketches to Punch in his spare time and would continue to be a regular writer for magazine until the 1980s.

As well as films, the success of his early novels brought him the friendship of fellow satirist Evelyn Waugh.

His later work included contributions to the script of Two Way Stretch (1960), another Sellers films, and writing the Michael Winner comedy You Must Be Joking! (1965). He also wrote for the television, his most notable work being on the Adventures of Robin Hood series in the 1960s.

In total he wrote around 30 screenplays, many more television scripts and half a dozen novels.

He lived for most of the later part of his life in a comfortable Edwardian house in Hertfordshire with his wife of 48 years, Peggy, who died in 1995, and then with partner Daisy de Bellefeuille. He was survived by six children.