Piers Haggard was the chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain (DGGB), now subsumed into Directors UK, for many years from its founding in 1982. The aim was to emulate the powerful Directors Guild of America in improving the conditions of colleagues in all media – while top directors in the UK were, and still are, well remunerated, many were exploited and undermined.
Under his leadership, the DGGB became a trade union and gradually established directors’ rights, negotiated codes of practice and initiated a successful strike of television directors in 2000.
As a callow practitioner myself, I witnessed his skill in bringing together directors of every kind – celebrity cinema directors along with those from TV, radio, theatre, opera, music videos and new media – and getting them to run masterclasses for each other. Organising these strong-minded individuals could at times be like herding cats, but Haggard kept morale high.
