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The Independent (21/Aug/2007) - Obituary: Peter Graham Scott

(c) The Independent (21/Aug/2007)

Obituary: Peter Graham Scott

One of the producers and directors who shaped British television drama in its formative years, Peter Graham Scott brought a background in film editing and directing to his work that helped to move the small screen out of an era of lifeless, studio-bound productions and towards programmes that owed more to cinema than to the stage.

As a director, he was notable for fast-paced, stylish, action series of the 1960s such as Danger Man and The Avengers, and was credited with casting Diana Rigg as the high-kicking, leather-clad Emma Peel. At the same time, he brought his producing talents to the first three series of the high-powered oil-industry drama The Troubleshooters (1966-72), having originally faced the prospect of failure with its previous incarnation, Mogul (1965).

It was one of the first programmes to portray the inner workings of big business, in this case an oil conglomerate - topical at a time when drilling was beginning in the North Sea. BBC Television's controller, Michael Peacock, had doubts about continuing Mogul beyond one series but eventually agreed to a new run, as long as the programme was made more popular and given a new title.

Scott put great effort into revitalis-ing it, keeping the leading three characters, played by Geoffrey Keen, Philip Latham and Ray Barrett, while replacing others, increasing the rivalries and injecting glamour by having filmed inserts shot in exotic locations. Over the next seven years, foreign shooting was done in places such as Venezuela, Africa and New Zealand, and The Troubleshooters became an international hit, sold to more than 60 countries (many under the original title). "The show had to move fast," recalled Scott. Oil was about movement, pressure, speed. Scenes would have to start in the middle, where the meat was, without actors drifting through doors, and cut straight to the next on the last word of the climax. I needed dynamic camera angles. Television cameramen were getting awfully lazy, offering up loose head-and-shoulder shots when asked for tight close-ups.

Further success as a producer came for Scott with the first three series of the popular period drama The Onedin Line (1971-80), focusing on another business - a shipping line - in an earlier era, with Peter Gilmore starring as the captain of a 19th-century, square- rigged, three-masted, top-sailed schooner, the Charlotte Rhodes. With some location shooting off the Dartmouth coast in Devon, this led to visually exciting television shortly after the switch-over to colour - and a whole new era for Scott.

He moved to the ITV company HTV, based in Bristol, and produced some of British television's earliest international co-productions, usually period dramas and often swashbucklers. The colourful, 13- part serial Kidnapped (1978), based on Robert Louis Steven-son's novel and made with Tele-Monchen of West Germany and Technisonor of France, followed the flight of Alan Breck Stewart (David McCallum) from English troops in the years after the Battle of Culloden and his friendship with a Lowlander, David Balfour (the German actor Ekkehardt Belle).

Scott himself adapted the book, finding that Stevenson's descriptions simply jumped off the pages and into the script. "Many of his sequences might have been specially conceived for the screen," explained Scott. He and the executive producer, Patrick Dromgoole, also decided to extend the adaptation to include the author's sequel, Catriona, providing a love interest for David - and viewers - in the 15-year-old French actress Aude Landry.

Avoiding as many studio scenes as possible, Graham and the French director Jean-Pierre Decourt shot some of the action against the beautiful backdrop of the Scottish Highlands, but the rest was filmed in suitable castles around Britain and the producer returned to Darmouth for quayside sequences. The resulting spectacle became one of his finest achievements.

Born in East Sheen, Surrey, in 1923, the son of a First World War veteran who lost a leg at Ypres and subsequently worked at the Canadian Army Records Office in London, Scott was brought up in Isleworth, Middlesex, and attended acting classes at the Italia Conti Academy. At the age of 13, he had a small role in the film Young and Innocent (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1937) and he later appeared in Pastor Hall (the story of how the Nazis took power in Germany, directed by Roy Boulting, 1940).

However, admiring Hitchcock's skills and seeing the plays of the theatre director Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic, he decided to move behind the scenes. After work as an assistant director on pictures such as Room for Two (1940), Major Barbara (1941) and Kipps (1941), he directed wartime propaganda films, starting with segments of C.E.M.A. (1941), promoting the activities of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts.

Second World War service with the Royal Artillery, starting in 1943, was brought to an abrupt end after an accident involving explosives, so Scott then took a job with the Colonial Film Unit, in London, and continued to direct films for the Ministry of Information, before switching to editing. He took his new talent to mainstream films such as the director John Boulting's gangster drama Brighton Rock (starring Richard Attenborough, 1947) and The Perfect Woman (with Patricia Roc, 1949).

After directing the comedy-drama Panic at Madame Tussaud's (1948), Scott soon became a fully fledged director but found his greatest success after moving to television in 1952 as a BBC trainee. He made the musical biography Our Marie (starring Pat Kirkwood as the music-hall star Marie Lloyd, 1953) and, for children's television, Clive Dunn (a 10-minute comedy sketch featuring the actor, 1954), before switching to Associated- Rediffusion, the newly launched ITV's first London weekday contractor.

He was particularly adept at single plays in the "Play of the Week" slot, at a time when television versions of stage productions were thriving. Then came another period with the BBC, where his last work as producer was on the espionage drama series Quiller (starring Michael Jayston, 1975). Scott continued to make films throughout this period, including the comedies Father Came Too! (starring James Robertson Justice, 1963) and, as vehicles for the small-screen comedian Charlie Drake, The Cracksman (1963) and Mister Ten Per Cent (1967).

In casting Peter Cushing as the village vicar Dr Blyss, alter ego of the pirate of the title, in the Hammer film Captain Clegg (1962), Scott allowed Cushing to break away from the austere roles such as Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes for which he was best known. "I felt strongly that Dr Blyss offered him a chance to be warmer and more human," he explained.

On his move to HTV, Scott produced the supernatural children's series Into the Labyrinth (1981-82), Arch of Triumph (with Anthony Hopkins as an Austrian refugee in Paris before the Nazi inasion, 1984), the swashbuckling co-production The Master of Ballantrae (another Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation, starring Michael York, 1984), Jenny's War (a wartime thriller, 1985), Jamaica Inn (from the Daphne du Maurier novel, 1985), The Canterville Ghost (featuring John Gielgud in the Oscar Wilde story, 1986) and Wall of Tyranny (also known as Freedom Fighter, about a romance divided by the Berlin Wall, 1988).

In recent years, Scott also attended fan conventions for The Prisoner, having directed an episode, "The General" (1967), of Patrick McGoohan's cult series about the freedom of the individual. He won the Royal Television Society's Sir Ambrose Fleming Award for outstanding contribution to television in 1984 and his memoirs, British Television: an insider's history, were published in 1999.

Scott's son Martin, who worked as a reporter, producer and editor in television news, died in a 2004 car crash. Earlier this year, his other son, Robin, died of cancer.

Peter Graham Scott, producer, director, editor and screenwriter: born East Sheen, Surrey 27 October 1923; married 1950 Mimi Martell (two daughters, and two sons deceased); died Windlesham, Surrey 5 August 2007.

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