Davies' first television play, "Who's Going to Take Me On?", was broadcast in 1967 as part of BBC1's "The Wednesday Play" strand. His early plays were written as a sideline to his work in education, many of them appearing in anthology series such as "Thirty Minute Theatre", "Play for Today" and "Centre Stage". One of his London stage plays, "Rose", played on Broadway in 1981, with Glenda Jackson and Jessica Tandy. His first serial adaptation of a work of fiction was of "To Serve Them All My Days" (1980), from the novel by R. F. Delderfield. He wrote "A Very Peculiar Practice" (1986–88), a campus based comedy-drama series that drew upon his career in education.