Christopher Ralling, who has died aged 95, brought amazing tales of adventure and human endurance to television in groundbreaking programmes that charted the journeys of the great explorers, from Charles Darwin and David Livingstone to Ernest Shackleton, Thor Heyerdahl and Chris Bonington.
The producer and director, who frequently used drama-documentary to make history come alive for viewers, also chronicled the road to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
He regarded his first major television project, The Search for the Nile (1971), about expeditions by Victorians obsessed with the source of Africa’s longest river, as “a great adventure”, shot on location on the continent.
As producer – as well as director of three of the six BBC episodes – he cast actors as history-makers such as Richard Francis Burton (played by Kenneth Haigh), Livingstone (Michael Gough) and Henry Morton Stanley (Keith Buckley), with James Mason narrating. The programme won a Primetime Emmy award in the US.
Ralling continued with drama-documentary – and filming in Africa, as well as Jamaica – when he directed the entire series of The Fight Against Slavery (1975). He commissioned Evan Jones, a Jamaican friend from Oxford University with the blood of both slaves and slave owners, to script it, with David Collings as William Wilberforce and Dinsdale Lansden as a plantation owner. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, a rusty old Thames lighter barge was rebuilt to resemble the hull of a slave ship.
A replica of the HMS Beagle, converted from a Spanish fishing vessel, was sailed to South America for what Ralling described as “the most important television series of my life”, The Voyage of Charles Darwin (1978). Starring Malcolm Stoddard in the title role, it told the story of Darwin’s scientific expedition preceding his book The Origin of Species.
He was firmly in the producer’s seat, with Martyn Friend directing, but accompanied the cast and crew on almost every step of their voyage. The programme won Bafta’s award for best factual series and contributed to Ralling’s lifetime achievement award from the academy.
David Schofield played the Antarctic explorer when Ralling wrote another dramatised historical series, Shackleton (1983). Eight years earlier, he had demonstrated the adventurer in himself as producer of Everest the Hard Way, joining Chris Bonington for Bonington’s successful ascent of the world’s highest mountain and making it as a straightforward documentary. Tragically, one of the two BBC camera operators, Mick Burke, died, last seen several hundred metres from the summit.
Later, in producing another documentary, The Kon-Tiki Man (1989), for a Swedish production company, he accompanied Heyerdahl – famous for his expeditions on balsa wood raft and reed boats – on return visits to exotic locations from his past.
Ralling’s first big adventure was being born on a kitchen table in Beckenham, Kent, to Dorothy (nee Williams) and Harold Ralling. He grew up in the Kent village of Brenchley on one of his father’s fruit farms; his parents had previously spent 20 years growing cash crops, including coffee, in Kenya.
On leaving Charterhouse school Ralling did national service in the Royal Army Service Corps, rising to the rank of second lieutenant, then studied English at Wadham College, Oxford (1949-52), where he developed leftwing leanings.
After working briefly on the family apple farm he joined BBC External Services in 1955 as a scriptwriter of talks and features that were translated for its European outlets. Soon he became a radio producer.
Ralling said his outlook on life was then transformed by a visit to the Hungarian border following the 1956 uprising. He drove his father’s lorry to take relief to refugees on the Austrian side of the border, along with two rubber dinghies for crossing the canal separating the two countries to transport hundreds of others to safety. In his 2017 autobiography, Scrapbook for Jessica: A Life in Broadcasting, he described the experience as “exhilarating”, and revealed that it triggered in him a new understanding of humanity and a more liberal viewpoint.
Not long afterwards, on attachment to the Australian network ABC (1958-59), he reported for radio programmes and made the television documentary The Question for Johnny, about the life of Indigenous Australian children.
Back in Britain he became a TV producer on news and magazine programmes at the BBC’s Southampton and Bristol studios before joining Panorama (1961-64) as a producer, then assistant editor. He was arrested while filming stories in Ghana, Serbia and Bulgaria, and worked on the first full-length British programme on Mao’s China.
Switching to the documentaries department, he produced and directed Mata Hari: The Eye of the Day (1965), on the exotic dancer who was executed as a German spy; To the South Pole with Peter Scott (1966), featuring Captain Scott’s son retracing his doomed father’s trek; Revolution in Hungary (1966), an account of the uprising that had changed his life; and Australia the Last of Lands (1970), the journalist Michael Charlton’s assessment of his homeland at the time of its bicentenary. He also created One Pair of Eyes, with James Cameron and others presenting their views on often controversial subjects, working as its executive producer from 1967 to 1969.
After serving as the BBC’s head of documentaries (1980-82), Ralling moved into independent production, notably for Channel 4. He directed episodes of Africa (1984), a history of the continent, and, in the vein of his earlier Mata Hari programme, Chasing a Rainbow: The Life of Josephine Baker (1986), on the singer-dancer and French second world war spy. He also made Return to Everest (1993), a nostalgic trip to the mountain’s base camp with John Hunt, Edmund Hillary and others from the first successful British expedition 40 years earlier. He was made OBE in 1992.
Ralling married Angela Gardner in 1963; she died in 2022. He is survived by their daughter, Joanna, and granddaughter, Jessica.
• Anthony Christopher Ralling, writer, producer and director, born 12 April 1929; died 23 July 2024
