Peter Phillips RIP

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During his 25 years at Granada, Phillips designed an impressive body of work which included plays by notable writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. His designs for Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, were among his most lavish studio-based sets. But the work for which he will remain best known is Brideshead Revisited (1981), directed by Charles Sturridge and starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick.

This lavish adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel was a huge and risky show for Granada to undertake at a time when the economics of television production were becoming a prominent issue. The projected production costs nearly caused its cancellation amid concerns that Brideshead would appeal to only a relatively small number of viewers. But members of the creative team, Phillips among them, persuaded Granada’s chairman Sidney Bernstein to proceed.

As production designer, Phillips was responsible for the Brideshead “look” which became so popular among the “young fogeys” of the 1980s, influencing everything from fashion to interior design. His sumptuous sets and choice of locations provided atmospheric backdrops for the actors and contributed significantly to the success of the series, winning him a Bafta award for Best Scenic Design.

The son of an officer at the School of Artillery, Peter Phillips was born in Kent on October 11 1925 and educated at various establishments, culminating in Canterbury School of Art. Towards the end of the war he joined the RAF and was sent to Stanmore camp for officer training, but was prevented by illness from entering active service.

Phillips’s career in design started when he was employed as assistant to Laurence Irving, to work on films for J Arthur Rank, among them the 19th-century costume drama Uncle Silas (1947). Unfortunately the job lasted for only two years, ending when Rank closed down.

After a period spent working on aircraft design, he was offered a job in Canada with the newly-established Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His arrival in Canada coincided with the beginning of a period in which television became an increasingly popular medium, giving creative people scope to innovate and experiment.
Initially Phillips worked on light entertainment shows, but he was then given the opportunity to design the sets for the world television premiere of the Benjamin Britten opera Peter Grimes.

In 1963, back in Britain, Phillips started to work for Sidney Bernstein at Granada Television. Bernstein recognised that in Phillips he had not only an excellent designer, but also a man whose knowledge and understanding of literature enriched his designs, enabling him to form close and productive working relationships with producers, directors and writers.

This was exemplified by the success of Granada’s production in 1963 of War and Peace (directed by Silvio Narizzano), which won the first Emmy to be awarded outside the United States. Although Phillips subsequently worked on other, better-known, productions, War and Peace remained the work of which he was most proud. The technical complexity of this four-hour studio-based epic, which was transmitted live, was an outstanding achievement for the production team and remains a landmark in the early development of television. Movement on the set, sensitive lighting and the stimulating use of colour, even before the advent of colour television, all contributed to the actors’ performance on camera.

Peter Phillips married, in 1957, Daphne Wilson, who survives him with their son and daughter.

Telegraph.

[Nick Dando]

From the Guardian

Nick

Peter Phillips obituary
Set designer awarded a Bafta for his lavish, meticulous work on Brideshead Revisited

Although he had been reluctant to work away from a television studio, Peter Phillips, who has died aged 85, was persuaded to take on the task of creating sets on dozens of filming locations for Granada Television's impressive 13-hour production of Brideshead Revisited (1981). The designer and his team evoked the decadent, opulent world depicted in Evelyn Waugh's novel about the aristocratic Marchmain family's decline between the two world wars. Phillips painstakingly transferred the visual details from the pages of the book to the screen, in a television production costing £10m – then a record.

Along with the leisurely photography and the beautiful period costumes, Phillips's sets helped to make Brideshead Revisited look sumptuous. These elements were combined with Geoffrey Burgon's atmospheric musical score, Jeremy Irons's mesmerising narration and a script – faithful to the novel – written by the producer Derek Granger with Martin Thompson, after John Mortimer's commissioned adaptation was abandoned. The result was a high point in the history of British television drama.

The production overcame many difficulties, including a three-month strike by ITV technicians that meant the original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, had to be replaced by Charles Sturridge. Phillips was responsible, with the producer, for choosing locations. Almost half of the 300 days' filming was at Castle Howard, in north Yorkshire, taking the story from the first visit by Charles Ryder (Irons) with his university friend Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews) to the death of Lord Marchmain (Laurence Olivier) and Charles's wartime return to Brideshead as an army officer.

The designer had to undertake major work – not just to decorate and dress rooms appropriately, but to create two new ones. A fire at Castle Howard in 1940 had ruined the garden hall, dining room and other areas. Phillips insisted the garden hall was needed to provide the magnificent vista of the fountain as seen through the house from the front entrance – and he had a blank canvas to work from when George Howard, the owner, had it rebuilt specially for the production. Phillips also transformed an empty basement space into the Brideshead dining room.

At Oxford University, he ensured that every aspect of Charles's rooms was as described in the novel. On the Maltese island of Gozo, which doubled for Morocco, he added Arabic arches to passageways; for shooting cabin scenes on a choppy Atlantic ship crossing, he had a set built on rockers. There was filming in Venice, and Phillips also recreated a New York hotel foyer in the entrance hall of a Trafford Park asbestos factory. For his skills, he won the 1982 Bafta award for best scenic design.

Born in Whitstable, Kent, Phillips attended Canterbury School of Art and worked briefly for an architect, before enlisting in the RAF in 1943. He was then an assistant to the production designer Laurence Irving on the film melodrama Uncle Silas (1947), which starred Jean Simmons. When no more film work was forthcoming, he became a designer at an aircraft factory near Wolverhampton.

Hearing about jobs at CBC's newly launched television service in Canada, Phillips moved there in 1952 and worked on light entertainment shows, before designing sets for Folio (1954-59), a series of single plays and music performances.

In 1959, he returned to Britain and joined the ITV company Granada, where his love of literature was given plenty of opportunity to thrive. Phillips was the production designer on the serialisation of HG Wells's Kipps (1960), the season of plays A Choice of Coward (1964), The Caesars (1968) and dozens of other classics, including War and Peace (1963), Persuasion (1971) and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1976), which starred Laurence Olivier.

Having enjoyed the challenge of constructing elaborate sets in studios, Phillips was initially apprehensive about taking on Brideshead Revisited, which was to be filmed entirely on location. He felt there would be little left for him to do, but was persuaded by Granger that it would present plenty of challenges. He found the experience rewarding, and subsequently designed Mortimer's 1984 feature-length television adaptation of the John Fowles novel The Ebony Tower, filmed in France and again starring Olivier. Phillips retired from Granada two years later.

He married Daphne Wilson in 1957. She and their two children – a son, Sebastian, and a daughter, Sarah – survive him.

• Peter Edward Sidney Canton Phillips, production designer, born 11 October 1925; died 10 January 2011

[cornershop15]

I watched one of those Noel Coward plays, Present Laughter, only last week. The main stars were Peter Wyngarde, Barbara Murray, Ursula Howells and Joan Benham, with a young James Bolam and Jennie Linden among the supporting cast.

After my viewing, I noticed that the programme's IMDb page was missing just one credit, 'Designed by Peter Phillips', which I duly submitted. Thankfully, this has now been added to his filmography and I suspect I might have to do the same with The Vortex later this week.

A couple of inbetween shots of Mr. Phillips' set for Peter Wyngarde's living room in Present Laughter (1964):


This is the very last shot in the entertaining Granada production:

Believe it or not, I've never seen Brideshead Revisited so maybe someone can show some examples of the sadly late production designer's work on the series. That obituary reveals that he made a massive contribution not only to the series but to the redevelopment of Castle Howard.

R.I.P, Peter Phillips

[Arfur Teacake]

Good call Nick and Cornershop, when you see sometimes rather tatty looking sets on Elstree and Yorkshire TV (IMHO) productions, your thread makes you appreciate what a good set designer can do