Richard Broke, who has died aged 70, not only produced and script-edited some of the most significant – and politically controversial – television dramas; he did so from a wheelchair, after being injured in a car crash in his 20s, and became a fierce campaigner for better access in public places, particularly in the theatre, one of his great loves.

As a young assistant stage manager, before his accident, he helped Laurence Olivier launch the first Chichester Festival theatre season. The stellar cast included Olivier himself, Joan Plowright, Michael Redgrave, Sybil Thorndike, André Morell, Lewis Casson, Joan Greenwood, John Neville and Keith Michell. One of his treasured possessions was the 1962 programme of Uncle Vanya, signed by them all.

At the BBC and ITV, he went on to work with many of the best, and best-known, actors of the day. In 1981, for Southern Television, he produced Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, a landmark, eight-part serial starring Robert Hardy, Siân Phillips, Nigel Havers, Tim Pigott-Smith, Peter Barkworth and Eric Porter.

As the first executive producer of Screen One for the BBC (he told the Guardian it was the best job in television), he was responsible for around 50 films over the years, culminating in Cold Comfort Farm in 1995, directed by John Schlesinger. This featured another star-studded cast: Eileen Atkins, Kate Beckinsale, Stephen Fry, Ian McKellen, Joanna Lumley, Miriam Margolyes, Freddie Jones and Rufus Sewell. The screenplay, from the Stella Gibbons novel, was by Malcolm Bradbury.

With Schlesinger as director, Broke was executive producer of the award-winning A Question of Attribution (1991) for the BBC, from Alan Bennett's stage play about Anthony Blunt (played by James Fox, with Prunella Scales as the Queen). He was proud to have written the screenplay for James Mason's final film – Dr Fischer of Geneva (1985), from Graham Greene's novel – which also starred Alan Bates, Greta Scacchi and Barry Humphries.

But in the mid-80s, Broke became best-known ("synonymous with the word 'controversial'," wrote the Guardian) for two productions that helped fuel the BBC's head-on conflict with the Thatcher government, in particular the Conservative party chairman Norman Tebbit, and also with the military.

The first was The Monocled Mutineer (1986), a series of plays written by Alan Bleasdale and starring Paul McGann as Percy Toplis, a deserter in the first world war. The BBC advertised the series "foolishly", wrote the director general, Alasdair Milne, in his memoirs, "as being 'a real life story', which was certainly cutting corners. The press fell upon us for telling lies and it added to their fury that most of the papers saw the plays as 'leftwing propaganda'. The fact that they were well-made dramas counted for nothing."

The second was Tumbledown (1988), directed by Richard Eyre, with a screenplay by Charles Wood, which won the Bafta award for best single drama. It starred a young Colin Firth as Robert Lawrence MC, a Scots Guards officer who was severely injured and partly paralysed during the Falklands war. His family was involved in the making of the film, much to the ire of the Ministry of Defence. The press contrasted the screening of these two productions, which questioned military policy, with the BBC's shelving of a "pro-Thatcher" Falklands play by Ian Curteis.

"I never set out to make controversial drama and I would fall flat on my face if I did so," Broke told an interviewer at the time. But according to friends he relished the controversy and loved it when the Daily Mail attacked one of his programmes.

Born in London to a Norfolk county family with a penchant for amateur dramatics, he was educated at Eton, leaving at 17 to go straight into the theatre. His first job in 1961 was at Frank Hauser's Oxford Playhouse; his second at the Chichester Festival theatre under Olivier. But after a short stint in London on the Lionel Bart musical Blitz!, he decided the world of theatre was precarious, and joined the BBC as a trainee.

He worked on a wide range of television programmes, from the cult drama series Adam Adamant Lives! to a forerunner of Top of the Pops. Then, in 1970, came the car crash that was to leave him in a wheelchair as a paraplegic. He was driving up the A1 near Sandy in Bedfordshire, when he veered off the road, hit a bank and – this was in the days before compulsory seatbelts – suffered multiple trauma and broke his spine.

He was treated at Stoke Mandeville hospital, to which he would return from time to time over the coming years, but he rarely allowed his disability to get in the way of his work. He campaigned fiercely for better wheelchair access in theatres – not least at the newly built National Theatre, which he regarded as disgracefully badly equipped in its early days.

He also supported efforts to improve the portrayal of disabled people on television, citing Ironside, the American detective in a wheelchair played by Raymond Burr, as the most positive role model. "The Americans are years ahead of us on this," he said in 1995. "A disabled character was at the centre of a popular entertainment without making a great issue of it."

On his return to the BBC, he became a researcher on the Dennis Potter serial Casanova (1971) and was then steered into script editing, where he worked on Thirty-Minute Theatre and memorable series such as The Glittering Prizes (1976). There he began a fruitful partnership with Mark Shivas, building up the trust of the best writers, actors and directors, with whom he would work when he ran Screen One.

He left the BBC for two years, to dramatise Martin Gilbert's biography Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years for Southern Television. "I'm still very proud of that," he said. "It was a landmark for me." Later he produced other dramas for ITV, including 32 episodes of Where the Heart Is, the highly popular series about Yorkshire district nurses and their families.

Broke was a stalwart supporter of Bafta, serving on its council (1992-97) and its TV committee (2003-09). He was also the first chair of its newly established interactive entertainment awards (1998).

He is survived by his wife, Elaine (nee Carew), a makeup artist who worked on the Monty Python and Terry Gilliam films among others, whom he married in 1989, and by their two daughters, Anna and Bella.

He was an active member of St Michael and All Angels Church in Chiswick, west London – reading the lesson, competing fiercely on quiz nights and suggesting fundraising ideas for a new organ. He took particular pleasure in blogging about a Hymnathon two years ago, when the choir and congregation sang all 542 hymns in the New English Hymnal, right through the night. "The organ is falling to bits," he wrote. "In fact, we cannot know who will crack first in this wonderful, slightly crazy venture – the choir or the organ." A memorial service - accompanied by the new organ - will be held there on 1 May.

• Richard Broke, television and film producer, born 2 December 1943; died 14 April 2014