In 1966 the television film-maker John Mapplebeck, who has died aged 86, made an early mark with an item in the BBC2 series New Release on how interest in poetry was flourishing around the work of Basil Bunting in Newcastle.
The project got off to a rocky start when the cameraman said that it was too dark to film the poet walking down the street. The next day the inexperienced director insisted, but noticed the letters SUP on the clapperboard – “shot under protest”, the electricians advised him. However, John’s idea prevailed, and he went on to direct arts films
for TV for more than four decades.
Originally John had planned to move from radio to television via the current affairs programme Tonight, but when that did not work out he contacted me as producer of New Release. We had worked together in Newcastle, and did so on many subsequent occasions, both for the BBC and later on ITV for The South Bank Show, becoming lifelong friends.
John was not only a working-class intellectual, but a north of England working-class intellectual, inspired by Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. He learned how to edit programmes as well as make films, and in 1967 went to Manchester to edit the BBC TV news magazine programme Look North.
Its opposition on Granada was fronted by Michael Parkinson and Bill Grundy. John’s drive saw his programme overtake them in audience figures, but inevitably he offended the more established BBC North figures, including the industrial correspondent, who refused to cover an unofficial strike at Liverpool Docks. When John got someone else to do it, the correspondent wrote to the BBC hierarchs, saying that John was a “Trotskyist Maoist”. This resulted in a “not to be trusted” Christmas tree symbol on John’s file.
John went his own way for BBC Arts and BBC Factual: a regional series with the architecture critic Ian Nairn, Nairn’s North (1967), was followed by three network series, Nairn at Large (1969), Nairn’s Europe (1970) and Nairn Across Britain (1972). The Story of the WPA (1976) told the story of the Works Progress Administration, the agency that implemented President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.
He then moved to BBC North East and Cumbria as senior producer and became editor of features, responsible for weekly programmes and non-daily news output, including the radical current affairs series Coast to Coast. For The South Bank Show he went to Prague to film the director Miloš Forman (1982).
In 1990 the BBC’s strategy for the north of England changed again, and John set up as an independent with Bewick Films. There he made programmes not only for the BBC, but also for the ITV stations Granada, Tyne Tees and Border, winning eight regional and national awards.
One of his films marked the 50th anniversary of the disaster in which 104 miners died at the William Pit, Whitehaven, Cumbria, and others featured the Dalai Lama and the American actor Zero Mostel. Under James Graham, Border Television was making films with Channel 4 in mind, as well as local audiences. Haig: A Scottish Soldier (1994), set out to assess what, in his Presbyterian upbringing in the Scottish borders, had prepared Field Marshal Haig to absorb the disastrous casualties on the Somme.
John went back to London for a while, to work on The South Bank Show, making films for it on the centenary of the poet WH Auden (2007), David Peace’s biography of the football manager Brian Clough, Damned United (2008), and The Pitmen Painters (2009), Lee Hall’s play about the miners and self-taught artists from Ashington, near Newcastle, in the 30s and 40s.
Born in Middlesbrough, John was the only child of Winifred (nee Smith) and Albert Mapplebeck, an engine driver. His early years were spent in Hull, which was heavily blitzed. He left Chapeltown secondary modern school at 15, having failed both his 11-plus and the later selection test at 13, but he was involved in his school’s radio station and determined to become a newspaper reporter.
The family moved to Leeds, and while watching a football match John met a sports reporter from the North Leeds News. The reporter was off for his national service the following month, and his job was vacant.
Despite the pay being only half that of John’s work as a trainee in an upmarket furniture store, his parents allowed him to take the necessary wage cut.
He used a combination of day release and night school to acquire the qualifications for a journalist’s training scheme, worked on various West Riding weekly newspapers, undertook national service (1955-57), and arrived back in Leeds for the Yorkshire Evening Post.
The job of junior reporter, doubling as the paper’s theatre critic, proved ideal for him. But in 1959 he moved on after he and other journalists had supported printers in an industrial dispute, and he was viewed as a ringleader.
As a feature writer and northern theatre critic for the Guardian in Manchester, he found the experience “inspiring – it was, for me, a sort of university”.
Nonetheless, “the rather chilly atmosphere of earnest good work, combined with a total lack of warmth in relationships between management and workers”, meant that after two years he had had enough.
In 1961 he joined BBC Radio in Newcastle, as a producer of a programme called Voice of the People, edited by Dick Kelly, who had spotted the potential of the new generation of midget tape recorders, which were to free radio from the formalities of the studio interview. The series was tremendously successful: Kelly used the distance from London and its perceived remoteness from central command to take risks, and employed talented broadcasters such as Alex Glasgow and Harold Williamson to rove across the north-east.
From then on, John came to represent what was best in radio and television, both affable and, when needed, tough.
In 1957 he married Betty Smith, and they had a son, Jo, and daughter, Victoria. Betty and John divorced in 1972. The following year he married Patricia Swift, and they had two sons, Will and Ed. She died in 2003.
For the last 17 years of his life, John was happy with his partner Anne Robson, with whom he had worked in regional radio during the 1960s. She died in 2021.
He is survived by his children and his grandchildren, Joanna, Mary, Jim, Richard, George, Grace and Freddie.
• John Barrie Mapplebeck, television director, born 6 December 1935; died 10 November 2022
