Stacy Marking, who has died aged 83, was one of the first female directors working in television documentary films, with her focus predominantly on race, poverty and injustice.
She started out with Rediffusion in the early 1960s as a researcher on the current affairs series This Week, and went on to direct an episode of the BBC series Scrutiny, presented by Derek Hart, which examined social issues in Britain. For Housing – After the Rent Act (1967), which showed how landlords exploit loopholes in the law, Marking caught threats of violence against her interviewer, the journalist David McKie, on camera.
She began making music videos and lightshows for bands including UFO, Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, and in 1969 she directed the series Nice Time, a Granada sketch show that featured Kenny Everett and Germaine Greer early in their careers.
Later, as part of the consortium that bought up History Today magazine in 1981, she was instrumental in the launch of the Channel 4 TV series Today’s History, and directed 12 episodes of the prime-time show, which looked at the historical context of contemporary issues.
She was born Judy Waddy in Rochford, Essex, on the eve of the second world war, the daughter of Margaret (nee Danby) and the Rev Pat Stacy Waddy, and grew up in India, where her father was the dean of the Anglican cathedral in Bombay (Mumbai). Despite the fear of war spreading to India, she had a carefree childhood until, in 1946, she and her brother, Christopher, returned to a cold postwar England for their education.
An unhappy time at Parkfield school in Horsham, West Sussex, a strict boarding school, encouraged Stacy always to question authority and seek alternative paths. After O- and A-levels at Princess Helena college in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, she went to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she studied English literature, and won the annual Vogue talent contest for young writers. She moved to London in 1959 for a job on the magazine’s fashion desk.
Soon bored, she decided to travel. In Istanbul she was spotted and offered a part in a film, thus beginning a short career as a Turkish screen star. While appearing in 23 movies, she discovered her passion for film.
Back in London, she enrolled as one of the early students of film at the Slade School of Art, from where she was recruited by Jeremy Isaacs to work on This Week, as a researcher and director of clips for the show. She started to use her middle name, the unisex Stacy, as she found she would get better access if people thought she was a man. Throuighout the 60s she also produced features and interviews as a freelance print journalist.
In 1971 she temporarily left broadcasting, and went travelling again, this time to Latin America, where she met and, in 1972, married Giles Marking, an architect. They went on to have a daughter, Havana, and spent a year in Seattle, where Giles taught at the University of Washington, then returned to live in London, where Stacy taught film at St Martin’s and Goldsmiths, as well as writing for publications including the Guardian, Sunday Times, Vogue and Spare Rib, and working as TV editor and critic for Time Out magazine.
In 1981, the publishers Longmans decided the magazine History Today no longer fitted its stable of publications. Most of the staff were made redundant and the magazine was offered for sale. Stacy was part of a consortium, with the journalist Hugh Stephenson, the businessman John Jackson and the historian Jerome Kuehl, who put together a deal to buy it, ensuring the survival of a magazine with contributions from academic historians but with a popular and democratic appeal. I became the magazine’s editor in 1982.
It was Stacy who pitched the idea of a TV history series to Channel 4. She thought that women were under-represented on television, and suggested that I should be a presenter of Today’s History, interviewing distinguished figures such as Asa Briggs, AJP Taylor and Neal Ascherson. They were radical films covering topics from abortion to Poland between the wars. Several of the presenters were women, and the series gave the cultural theorist Stuart Hall of the Open University a mainstream outlet.
Stacy also went on to produce and direct How Wars End (1985), a six-part series of history lectures by Taylor, for Channel 4. Her commitment to social justice never stopped – she was always joining marches to highlight the injustices around the world. After she stepped down from History Today in 1995, she and Giles bought a Dorset farm, where she was soon adept at delivering and nurturing lambs.
A first marriage, to Ian Borton, ended in divorce. Christopher died in 1998. Stacy is survived by Giles and Havana, and by a granddaughter, Celia.
• Stacy Marking, film-maker and publisher, born 13 November 1939; died 2 October 2023
