Peter Nichols is well-used to accusations that when it comes to finding suitable material for his plays he takes the easy option.

While other playwrights spend torturous years in research, plunging the depths of their imagination, Nichols, they say, simply looks at what he was doing last month or last year and sets to work.

There's more than a grain of truth in the claims. His first play, being revived at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, was based on his experience in the Army Entertainments Corps alongside the likes of Stanley Baxter and Kenneth Williams.

His most controversial A Day in the Death of Joe Egg was inspired by his disabled and severely brain damaged daughter and after a failed attempt to write a novel he came up with A Piece of My Mind about a failed novelist turned playwright.

"Being autobiographical has become more acceptable," says the 81-year-old.

"However, I think most writers of fiction, whether it be poetry, novels or plays always draw on their own lives. Some may disguise it more than others and maybe I was a little more open about it, but I don't see the problem.

"In fact, when Stanley Baxter heard I was writing Privates on Parade he was worried about how his character was going to come across. When he went to see it, he told me how completely disappointed he was that it bore no resemblance to our experience and that I had totally made everything up."

While his account of life in a post-Second World War entertainment troop may be fictional, it has, like many of Peter's other plays, stood the test of time.

"There are three new productions of my plays this year and that's pretty much the norm," he says.

"I'm probably not the best person to ask why they have endured, but I would like to think it was the quality of the writing."

While Peter, born in Bristol, didn't exactly excel academically, he always harboured ambitions of being a writer and left school dreaming of Hollywood.

National conscription got in the way, but after spells in India and Singapore, he returned home to pick up where he left off.

"At that time there were no university courses dedicated to creative writing, so if you wanted to be a playwright the only way in was to go to drama school to train to be an actor," he says. "It was good fun, but writing was where my heart lay. Friends told me to train as a teacher as a fall back, but also because it would give me time to write during the summer holidays."

His efforts out of term-time led to the completion of Privates on Parade, but even before he'd dotted the Is and crossed the Ts he feared it already might be out of date.

"I said to Albert Finney, 'it's no good, the idea has already been done by It Ain't Half Hot Mum," says Peter, referring to the popular television series. "Albert told me not to worry, that my play would be different and that audiences would want to come. I'm so very glad I listened to him."

If Privates on Parade amused audiences, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg was the play which would make his name with the critics. The tragi-comedy about a couple with a severely disabled daughter premiered at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre but its subject matter proved too uncomfortable for some.

"Of course I was aware of what was likely to happen, but I didn't set out intentionally to shock," he says. "The problem was that no one had written a comedy with a handicapped character at its core and the censors didn't know what to do."

Joe Egg premiered in 1967 a year before the Lord Chamberlain's responsibility for theatre censorship was removed, and his run-in with the authorities provided material for a later play Blue Murder. "They wanted us to use a ventriloquist dummy or a mannequin instead of an actress for the disabled character," he says. "Of course, the Lord Chamberlain didn't come down himself, two army officers were given the very silly job of telling you what you could and couldn't do. Some people got quite angry about their intrusion, but I found it all quite amusing."

While Peter is still writing, it's the diaries which he's kept on and off since 1974 that now mostly occupies his time.

"It's been a bit like smoking," he says. "Sometimes I've stopped and not written for months or even years, but there's always something that lures me back to diary writing. It's one of the few times you can write what you think and no one contradicts you."

Privates on Parade runs from September 15 to October 11.

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