Leftist producer pioneered social realism on TV with influential Cathy Come Home

Tony Garnett, who has died aged 83, was a pioneering producer of television drama, from the powerful and influential Cathy Come Home ,an angry polemic against homelessness, in 1966 to the 20-somethings series This Life in the 1990s. He also produced the 1969 film Kes.

A lifelong Marxist, Garnett had been working as a jobbing actor when, with the young director Ken Loach, he was recruited by the BBC in 1964 to create a series of new television plays in the increasingly fashionable genre of social realism.

After the success of Up The Junction (1965), which included a harrowing backstreet abortion scene, he was promoted to producer, and with Roach and writer Jeremy

Sandford came up with Cathy

Come Home, about a homeless young family battling to stay together. It was shot on location in three weeks in a documentary style, with handheld cameras on 16mm film, as used by news cameramen.

Garnett was astonished by the reaction to his film. With Loach and Sandford, he was invited to tea with the housing minister, who praised it extravagantly before adding: ‘‘But what can one do?’’ Garnett later admitted that they had made a liberal, hand-wringing piece with no radical solutions, and wished he had made Sandford give it more political bite.

Nonetheless Cathy Come Home became the first instance of television spurring public debate. In the 1970s, Garnett produced Law and Order, looking at the legal system from four different standpoints – villain, detective, lawyer and prisoner – which led to hostile questions in Parliament.

He also produced Days Of Hope (1975), about the General Strike of 1926, and the visually distinctive This Life (1996-97), which introduced new technology into drama production.

As an independent film-maker he produced Kes – about a working class boy who begins training a kestrel – Prostitute (1980), which he also wrote, and Beautiful Thing (1996). But finding himself out of step with the political and financial climate he moved to Hollywood, where he produced four feature films, including Handgun (1983) and Shadow Makers (1990).

After an unhappy decade in the US he returned to Britain, rebooting his career with edgy police dramas like Between The Lines (BBC, 1992) and The Cops (BBC, 1998-2001), which displeased the Greater Manchester force, who withdrew co-operation after the first series because of its unflattering depiction of policing a sink council estate.

Garnett seemed most at home with the BBC, although he fought prolonged and fierce internal battles against its worst bureaucratic excesses. He aimed to reach a mass audience, but his television output tended to find a

Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz natural home on minority channels that offered a comfortable berth for work in the social realist tradition. Garnett’s work reminded viewers of his extraordinary ability, as one Channel 4 executive put it, to tap into what was contemporary at any particular time.

The elder son of a toolmaker, Anthony Thomas Lewis was born in Birmingham. When he was 5, both his parents died, his mother from a botched abortion, followed three weeks later by the suicide of his father. Tony was brought up by an uncle and aunt called Garnett.

Ignoring most formal lessons at school, he spent much of his spare time in Birmingham’s reference library reading Shakespeare and Jacobean plays, the romantic poets, 19th-century novels and Karl Marx’s Capital.

Rejected for National Service because of poor eyesight, he took a job as an assistant stage manager, and later actor. In 1957, aged 21, he won a scholarship to University College London to read psychology. As he packed, the

Garnetts gave him his share of the money left by his parents, and his father’s suicide note.

His studies were cut short a year later when he landed his first television role, in Incident At Echo Six (1958), followed by The Age Of Kings (1961), a memorable BBC season of Shakespeare’s history plays.

His turning point came in 1964 when he was cast in Catherine, a 30-minute play by Roger Smith, produced by Jim MacTaggart and the directing debut of Ken Loach. The job led to Garnett being asked to give up acting to join Smith, MacTaggart and Loach, all radicals of the Left, in a new venture, a series of some 30 contemporary dramas commissioned by the BBC. Under the generic title The Wednesday Play, it featured socially engaged productions and ran until 1970, when the strand was renamed Play For Today.

He detested personal publicity, refused requests for interviews and declined repeated invitations to appear in Who’s Who, saying he did not care for the company he would keep. His memoir, The Day the Music Died, appeared in 2016.

Tony Garnett was twice married and divorced. With actress Topsy Legge he had a son, and another with his second wife, Alexandra Ouroussoff. –

He declined repeated offers to appear in Who’s Who, saying he did not care for the company he would keep.