Peter Graham Scott - Avengers, Prisoner TV Producer RIP

[samkydd]

Telegraph Obituary

Peter Graham Scott, who died on Sunday aged 83, was an award-winning producer behind many classic television series of the 1960s and 1970s including The Avengers, The Prisoner, The Troubleshooters and The Onedin Line; he was also a talented director in television and films.

Scott's ability to produce and direct fast-paced episodes of popular programmes - skills developed as a young film editor - ranked him among the best and most reliable in the business.

An energetic perfectionist, Scott was one of the pioneers of television drama, joining the BBC as a trainee after the war before moving to ITV when it launched in 1955.

In the early 1970s Scott produced the first three series (42 episodes) of The Onedin Line, the brainchild of a former Liverpool bus driver, Cyril Abraham, about the fortunes of a fictional 19th-century shipping company; it ran from 1971 until 1980. Scott also wrote the script for one episode and directed five of them.

The programme's second series was threatened with cancellation following Scott's (then) colossal overspend on the first of more than £60,000; but when German television bought The Onedin Line in 1972 it became a huge earner for the BBC, which eventually sold it to more than 90 countries, including the United States. The series was subsequently re-edited and released as a set of eight videos.

Scott had cut his teeth with Associated-Rediffusion during ITV's early years, directing, in Battle of Britain Week 1956, an acclaimed live production of Richard Hillary's Second World War classic The Last Enemy.

Referring to Scott's production, also live, of the American David Karp's One for Associated-Rediffusion the same year, Bernard Levin hailed "ITV's finest hour (and a half)" while another critic praised Scott's "technical skill and artistic integrity [that] can make TV a true medium in its own right".

Always known as Peter Graham Scott to distinguish him from the naturalist Peter Scott, he enjoyed the company of writers and actors and once found himself at a party in Wales for Dylan Thomas. Although assigned to drive him home, Scott had fallen asleep in a garden tent when the poet drunkenly opened the flap and relieved himself over his slumbering chauffeur.

The next day, Thomas airily dismissed the incident. "It is obviously your fate," he prophesied, "to be pissed upon by genius!"
Years later Scott secured, for cash, the television rights to The Quare Fellow after an evening's heavy drinking with Brendan Behan in a London pub; it was broadcast live in November 1958, one of many plays Scott produced and directed during what he considered "the best years of ITV".

Appointed Associated-Rediffusion's senior drama producer, he supplemented his earnings by breaking off to make feature films for Hammer, such as Captain Clegg (1961) starring Peter Cushing. Over eight years, Scott produced or directed 35 full-length television dramas and 29 series episodes.

Returning to the BBC in the mid-1960s Scott produced more than 70 episodes of Mogul, a series about the oil business which faltered at first but was later revived in more hard-hitting form as The Troubleshooters.

One of Scott's triumphs was to persuade the Shakespearean actor Robert Hardy to join the cast; in 1966 the programme won a Bafta for best TV drama series. For ITV in the early 1960s Scott had directed seven episodes of Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan, who later took the central role in the cult series The Prisoner, on which Scott also worked.

As director on The Avengers, Scott cast a leather-clad Diana Rigg as Emma Peel to replace Honor Blackman, having met her, he recalled, under a grand piano at a Christmas party.

Further feature films followed, including Bitter Harvest (1962), The Cracksman (a vehicle for Charlie Drake) and Father Came Too (both 1963).

Scott later struck up a long-standing association with HTV, working on such cult series as Into the Labyrinth (1981), which rivalled the BBC's Doctor Who, and Children Of The Stones (1977), which he also directed.

In 1982 he worked alongside McGoohan again for the television film Jamaica Inn, which co-starred Jane Seymour, whom Scott had cast as an unknown in The Onedin Line.

Peter Graham Scott was born on October 27 1923 at East Sheen and brought up at Isleworth. His early childhood was hard: his father, who had lost a leg at Ypres during the First World War, had taken a clerical job with the Canadian Army Records Office in London, only to find his pension reduced following the Wall Street crash of 1929, a mishap that drove him to drink.

The family fortunes were revived when his stagestruck mother (who had been born in Wandsworth workhouse) received an unexpected legacy; as well as winning a scholarship to the County School at Isleworth, young Peter also attended acting classes at the Italia Conti School, alongside the likes of Richard Todd, Leslie Phillips and George Cole.

This led to a two-line part in Alfred Hitchcock's film Young and Innocent (1937), an experience that revealed to the teenage Scott the power and potential of the director. In the early part of the Second World War, with encouragement from John Betjeman (who was then working for the Ministry of Information's films division) Scott made propaganda documentaries.

In late 1943 Scott was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and posted to the 145th Field Artillery Regiment, known as the Berkshire Yeomanry, where an accident caused by his explosives instructor led to a job with the Colonial Film Unit in London.
After the war he worked on short topical films in Rank's series "This Modern Age", one assignment taking him to Cairo with Peter Rodd, Nancy Mitford's estranged husband, as researcher.

Rodd asked him to break his journey home and deliver a large carton of soap powder to her Paris apartment. Scott was later startled to receive a postcard: "Many thanks for delivering the hashish. Nancy delighted. Love Prodd."
Scott began his career as a film editor on Brighton Rock (1947), starring Richard Attenborough, and later worked on other films such as The Perfect Woman and Landfall (both 1949), Shadow Of The Eagle (1950), The Small Miracle (1951) and River Beat (1954).

As a writer, Scott scripted Sing Along With Me (1952), which he also directed, The Big Chance (1957) and, in 1979, the ITV serial Kidnapped, which he also produced. His producing credits also included The Citadel (1960), The Curse Of King Tutenkhamun's Tomb (1980), Arch Of Triumph and Jenny's War (both 1985).
In 1960 Scott was chairman of the Guild of Television Producers when it merged with the British Film Academy to become the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta).

Scott was elected a Fellow of the Royal Television Society in 1979 and presented with the society's award for outstanding services to television in 1984. In 1999 he published his memoirs, British Television: An Insider's History.

Peter Graham Scott married, in 1950, Eve Rosemary Martell, always known as Mimi, who survives him with their two daughters; two sons predeceased him.

[alan gowdy]

An extraordinary life - you couldn't make it up. Anyone in the business who's done a quarter as much as PGS should be well pleased with themselves.

[smudge]

This was terrible news as only last Saturday afternoon PGS was sitting out on the lawns at Bray Studios with us all, for a Hammer Films event.

A true gent.

RIP

Smudge

[Geronimo]

Sad news indeed - i appeared in two episodes of Into The Labyrinth.

[John Llewellyn Moxey]

I knew Peter well. Another great loss.

John Llewellyn

[image45]

Originally Posted by smudge This was terrible news as only last Saturday afternoon PGS was sitting out on the lawns at Bray Studios with us all, for a Hammer Films event. A true gent. RIP Smudge

Yearh I know you just don'nt know when its going to be your turn to go sadly

[julian_craster]

Peter Graham Scott
Producer and director of fast-paced action series including 'Danger Man' and 'The Avengers'

THE INDEPENDENT
Published: 21 August 2007

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.

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 revitalising 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 Stevenson's novel and made with Tele-München 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.

Anthony Hayward

[julian_craster]

From Times
August 25, 2007
Peter Graham Scott
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 métier, 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 Troubleshoot-ers 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 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. 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

Peter Graham Scott, producer, director, writer and editor, was born on October 27, 1923. He died on August 5, 2007, aged 83

[julian_craster]

No mention of any feature films at all.......


Obituary
Peter Graham Scott
Television director and producer best known for The Onedin Line

Philip Purser
Friday August 31, 2007
The Guardian


Peter Graham Scott, who has died aged 83, was a veteran television producer,
director and occasional writer with a gift for nurturing long-running series
that were critically esteemed as well as immensely popular.
The Onedin Line (BBC, 1970-80), romanticising the life and voyages of a
19th-century shipping owner, eventually ran to no fewer than 91 episodes,
helped by the dreamy strains of its accompanying Khachaturian musical score.
Yet in its second year the show was nearly terminated because of the
enormous costs of its maritime sequences. Luckily, and in the nick of time,
West German television bought the series. Other foreign sales followed,
including one to the US. The Onedin Line sailed on.

Mogul (BBC, 1965) offers a perhaps more deliberate example of Scott's
instincts at work. Conceived by the distinguished documentary-drama writer
John Elliot, it was set in the world of a (fictional) oil giant.
Democratically, it would feature all ranks from the managing director to
fitters on the oil rigs. In this respect it followed the example of ITV's
The Plane Makers, launched the previous year with a brief to draw on the
shop floor as often as the boardroom. Alas, in both cases the audience
seemed to prefer the outsize characters.

The Plane Makers dwelt more and more on the ruthless managing director John
Wilder (Patrick Wymark), then followed him into the world of high finance
with a change of title to The Power Game. Mogul kept its top boss, Brian
Stead (Geoffrey Keen), also its financial wizard Willy Izzard (Philip
Latham), but concentrated on their relationship with the company's two young
lions, who were dispatched to sort out snags in plants and drilling sites
all over the world. With Ray Barrett and Robert Hardy in this role and a
change of title, The Troubleshooters went on to notch up 123 episodes,
though latterly Anthony Read took over as producer.

Born in East Sheen, Surrey, the young Scott - he inserted the Graham in
later days to avoid confusion when the naturalist Peter Scott was also
active on the television scene - won a scholarship to Isleworth county
school and took drama classes at the Italia Conti school. As a teenager
after the outbreak of war, he worked in the films division of the Ministry
of Information until he was called up for military service. However, as a
newly commissioned Royal Artillery officer, his service was abruptly ended
by an accident while training. Once recovered, he went back to film-making,
and by 1947 was an editor on Brighton Rock, starring the young Richard
Attenborough.

BBC television had resumed the previous year after its wartime shutdown,
though initially serving only the London area. As it gradually spread to
cover the whole country, with ITV due to arrive in 1955, film professionals
began to be drawn to the new medium. Scott joined the pioneer London
contractor, Associated-Rediffusion (A-R) Programmes were still broadcast
live from the studio, with bits of outdoor action - if unavoidable - filmed
in advance and cut into the transmission on cue. The moment usually stuck
out like a sore thumb. Drawing on his old film-editing skills, Scott
directed two amazing single productions which defied such limitations.

The Last Enemy (1956), from Richard Hillary's agonised memoir of war in the
air, switched seamlessly from studio to film and back again while also
hitting on such simple, effective studio ploys as a bare white wall to
locate a scene in a hospital. The Quare Fellow (1958) was Brendan Behan's
play of prison life, gaining in power from a deliberately cramped and
claustrophobic studio set. Scott also produced One Step Beyond for A-R
(1948-49), an enterprising series of spooky tales.

His career rolled on until the 1980s, with spells at the BBC and ITV, and
occasional forays back into the movies. Only when it came to mini-series did
his flair seem to desert him. In 1964 he directed The Four Seasons of Rosie
Carr (BBC), the over-sentimental four-part story, by Ted Willis, of a
warm-hearted Cockney woman making a new life in Australia. In 1985 he had a
star-stuffed turkey with another four-parter, and co-production with
America, the truly dreadful Jenny's War (HTV/Columbia). But always there
would follow a major undertaking as brave and original as The Borderers (BBC
1969-70), a kind of north-eastern western, written by Bill Craig, with Iain
Cuthbertson as the crafty warden (or sheriff) trying to keep the peace among
the rustlers, smugglers and plotters on the English-Scottish borders of the
17th century.

He is survived by his wife Rosemary, always known as Mimi, and their two
daughters. Two sons predeceased him.

Peter Graham Scott, writer, director and television producer, born October
27 1923; died August 5 2007

[bertie]

I recently got hold of a VHS copy of the 1984 TV film of 'The Master of Ballantrae' which was produced by Peter Graham Scott .

I had been looking for this for some time having read what is a rather strange book. What I found was a high quality production of the type that I doubt ITV would do these days. Over two and half hours long and starring John Gielgud, Michael York, Timothy Dalton, Finola Hughes, Richard Thomas and the late, but great, Ian Richardson.

A credit to the work of PGS.