Some of the most remarkable television dramas directed by David Attwood, who has died aged 71 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, observed ordinary people in extraordinary situations, dealing with what life has dealt them.
The feature-length Shot Through the Heart, a 1998 BBC co-production with American TV, told the true story of two soldiers on opposing sides of the war in Bosnia a few years earlier. Guy Hibbert’s script, based on a report by the American war correspondent John Falk, featured Vlado, a Croat played by Linus Roache, ordered to kill a Serbian sniper who is picking off Croatian and Muslim women and children in a Sarajevo street – only to be horrified on discovering that the marksman is Slavko, his best friend since childhood, played by Vincent Perez.
In the course of research for the drama, the real Vlado showed Attwood – who was keen to concentrate on the personal rather than the politics – photographs of himself and Slavko as youngsters. “Vlado was an ordinary person who just happened to get caught up in a war,” the director told the Independent journalist James Rampton. “The power of the film lies in the degree to which the viewer identifies with Vlado and goes through the experience with him.”
Attwood’s chance to make Shot Through the Heart came after success in the US with the ITV miniseries The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, Andrew Davies’s 1996 adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s book, with the lusty heroine (played by Alex Kingston) romping through 17th-century England. With no previous experience of costume drama, Attwood was considered the perfect director for it by David Lascelles, the producer, who wanted to make a period piece in a modern way by hiring someone “without baggage”.
It was also Attwood’s job to set the style and pace of the action for the Granada Television production. “Moll Flanders should glance off the screen and be irreverent, totally like Defoe,” he told me during filming. “The extravagance of Ken Russell is my influence for the flamboyant section featuring Moll’s second husband, Dawkins, and Sam Peckinpah’s western The Wild Bunch came to mind for the relationship between Moll and Lucy Diver, and all their stealing.”
Attwood went on to make television films such as Fidel (2002), a biopic of the Cuban leader for the US network Showtime starring Victor Huggo Martin as Castro and Gael García Bernal as Che Guevara.
He also nurtured Benedict Cumberbatch’s career, directing him in the BBC miniseries To the Ends of the Earth (2005), an adaptation of William Golding’s sea trilogy, with the actor playing a 19th-century English aristocrat on a long, fraught voyage to Australia, learning both the advantages and limitations of his social position. On location in South Africa, Attwood had to contend with difficult weather while filming a ship at a dock, while Cumberbatch was the victim of a carjacking by armed men.
Not put off by this experience of their working together, Attwood directed Cumberbatch shortly afterwards in the acclaimed television film Stuart: A Life Backwards (2007), an adaptation of Alexander Masters’s memoir, with Cumberbatch as the reclusive writer and Tom Hardy playing Stuart Shorter, a homeless alcoholic.
Attwood was born in Sheffield, to Doreen (nee Fidler) and Frank Attwood, a British Railways clerk. After moves to Biggleswade and Hull, the family settled in Cambridge and David attended Cambridgeshire high school for boys. While studying at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design (now Ravensbourne University London), in Bromley, Kent, he directed plays for Beckenham Theatre Company.
In 1973, he joined BBC Scotland in Glasgow as an assistant floor manager, a job he continued for BBC Birmingham at Pebble Mill from 1976. After working as a production assistant on Alan Bleasdale’s play The Black Stuff (1980), he was production manager on the resulting classic series Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), and other dramas.
Inspired by Pebble Mill directors such as Philip Saville and Stephen Frears, Attwood took a BBC course and made his directorial debut with Peter Buckman’s brass band comedy play All Together Now (1986). He followed it with episodes of the crime drama Rockliffe’s Babies (1987-88) and Malcolm McKay’s play Airbase (1988), whose story of drinking and drug-taking by American pilots in Britain sparked questions in parliament and a complaint from the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
Switching to ITV, Attwood directed another police series, The Bill, between 1989 and 1994, and during that period made the film Wild West (1992), a culture-clash comedy about a British-Asian country and western group, partly funded by Channel 4.
He was back at the BBC for Saigon Baby (1995), a play about a couple based in Thailand (played by Kerry Fox and Douglas Hodge) wanting to adopt a child and becoming involved in a baby trafficking business.
His other BBC feature-length productions include The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002) and May 33rd (2004), about a woman suffering a life of abuse. Naomie Harris and Jodhi May starred in Blood and Oil (2010), a two-part drama about British oil workers kidnapped in Nigeria.
In 1997, Attwood married the television producer Jane Tranter; they later separated. He is survived by Jane, their children, Maddy and Jo, and his brother, Philip.
• Frank David Attwood, director, born 28 August 1952; died 21 March 2024
