The Times (25/Aug/2007) - Obituary: Peter Graham Scott
(c) The Times (25/Aug/2007)
Obituary: Peter Graham Scott
Peter Graham Scott, producer, director, writer and editor, was born on October 27, 1923. He died on August 5, 2007, aged 83
Sought-after TV producer whose series and single plays brought new concepts to filming
A durable figure from the "golden age" of British television drama, Peter Graham Scott was a director of live, single plays who later became a producer of successful, long-running series. At a time when his contemporaries were largely recruited from the theatre or radio, he helped to expand the visual scale of television production, championing concepts such as location filming and multiple studio cameras.
Born in East Sheen, he was to take Graham Scott as his professional surname in order to avoid confusion with the naturalist Sir Peter Scott. At the instigation of his mother, a keen amateur actress, he became a boy actor, training at the Italia Conti School.
When playing a bit part in Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937), he realised his true vocation. Observing Hitchcock presiding over a complicated tracking shot, and calling for 16 takes, left him "in no doubt" that "I wanted to control and communicate my own message".
In 1942 he joined the Ministry of Information, where he was interviewed by John Betjeman and attempted to film a script written by Dylan Thomas. He then became a second lieutenant in the 145th Field Artillery Regiment, before editing War Office newsreels. After directing a short documentary, Sudan Dispute (1947), he edited Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1947).
Graham Scott became a BBC trainee producer in 1952. But it was at the fledgeling ITV that he found his metier, as a drama director. His productions included One (1956), an Orwellian "story of the foreseeable future", and The Last Enemy (1956), the true story of a boastful RAF pilot who experienced "the revival of his faith in his fellow men" after being disfigured in the Battle of Britain, which received much acclaim.
For Brendan Behan's The Quare Fella (1958), he was obliged to acquire the television rights by cornering Behan in a pub and, "some hours into the entertainment", handing the playwright a large amount of cash. Influenced by Graham Greene, Graham Scott wrote a stage play himself, The Breath of Fools, but its run at the Q Theatre, London, in 1955 was brief.
Back at the BBC, he produced Mogul (1965), set around an oil company. Renamed The Troubleshooters for its second series, it ran for seven years in all. Displaying a remarkable degree of technical sophistication for the time, the series entailed cutting between filmed inserts, overseas location shots and studio taping, all of which Graham Scott revelled in, receiving a Bafta for it in 1966.
At Patrick McGoohan's request, he directed the sixth episode of The Prisoner (1967). He later said he believed McGoohan's concept stemmed from the demands that starring in a TV series had made on him, "a virtual prisoner of his own success".
When Graham Scott produced The Borderers (1968), described as "a 16th-century Scottish Western", he cast the unknown Michael Gambon as Gavin Ker, a young laird.
In single plays or series episodes, Graham Scott gave early chances to Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Glenda Jackson, Judi Dench, John Thaw, Leonard Rossiter, Ronnie Barker, Oliver Reed and Hugh Grant. And when Elizabeth Shepherd, originally cast as Emma Peel in The Avengers in 1964, had to be replaced, he shot the screen test for "a girl I'd met resting under a piano at a Christmas party", the future Dame Diana Rigg.
He then produced the first three series of The Onedin Line (1971- 74). This BBC Victorian sailing saga, with Aram Khachaturian's Spartacus as its signature tune, had a popular appeal not always enjoyed by costume drama. Graham Scott believed that the inclusion in each episode of at least ten minutes of prefilmed action at sea "was a major contributor to the show's long-lasting success".
The final phase of his career was at HTV, the ITV network provider for Wales and the West Country. Kidnapped (1978) became the first British series to be shown on cable television in America.
Graham Scott published two novels, Dragonfire (1981) and A Feast of Vultures. To his regret, the modest films he directed "continue to turn up, wraithlike, on late-night television, while none of my better work, transmitted live to disappear forever after one performance, has been preserved". Captain Clegg (1962) was for Hammer, while The Cracksman (1963) and Mister Ten Per Cent (1967) starred Charlie Drake, who "combined on-screen pathos with off- screen arrogance".
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society in 1979. Retiring in 1992, he was dismayed by the BBC closing several of "its invaluable departments", and regarded the auction of the ITV franchises in 1991 as an "incredible mistake". His hope was that the new technology "produces a flood of new ideas alongside the inanities of tabloid television".
He is survived by his wife, Mimi, a former production design assistant whom he married in 1950, and their two daughters, his two sons having predeceased him.
