Tony Garnett
Producer
TONY GARNETT, who has died at 83, was an actor-turnedfilmmaker who produced such seminal Ken Loach works as Kes and Cathy Come Home, and who was later behind the influential 1990s TV series, This Life.
The partnership of Garnett and Loach was one of the most enduring in British popular culture.
Garnett believed not only in the power of drama to communicate truth, but “understood the basic conflict at the heart of society between those with power who exploit, and those who are exploited”, Loach said in tribute to his former colleague. “That essential conflict was at the heart of everything.”
The two men had cemented their reputation in 1966 with Cathy Come Home, a play about homelessness written by Jeremy Sandford but presented as if it were a documentary.
Its uncompromising style made it hugely controversial, especially with the clean-up TV campaigners. In 2000, the British Film Institute named it the second most important TV programme ever made.
But with Kes, the story of a Yorkshire schoolboy who retreats from the society he believes has failed him and finds solace with a wild kestrel, Garnett and Loach mined an even deeper vein.
The 1969 film, based on a book by Barry Hines, a PE teacher from Hoylake, near Barnsley, brought to the screen a level of Northern realism that was unusual for its time.
Born in Birmingham as Anthony Lewis, Tony Garnett was raised by an aunt and uncle after his parents died when he was five – his mother from the effects of a back-street abortion. He read psychology at University College, London, where he spent most of his time acting in the drama society.
He got early work on television, appearing in An Age of Kings, the BBC’s distillation of Shakespeare’s history plays, and in several contemporary works by David Mercer.
He became an assistant story editor on the BBC’s Wednesday Play, and worked on Up The Junction, Nell Dunn’s unflinching portrayal of unwanted urban pregnancy. It was intensely personal to him, he said, given what had happened to his mother.
Tony Garnett on his choice of subjects for his films and TV shows.
Determined to see it made and unsure what his bosses would make of it, he set in motion the production when the producer was away on holiday. Not long after its transmission, Garnett was elevated to the role of producer, and left acting behind.
He married the actress Topsy Jane, a starlet who seemed destined for the big time. In 1962 she had starred opposite Tom Courtenay in Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and had been cast as his love interest in Billy Liar, the following year. But as filming began in Bradford, she fell ill, was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given electro-shock treatment. “She had been sent back as someone else – the opposite of the woman I knew,” Garnett was to write.
He founded Kestrel Productions with Mercer, the literary agent Clive Goodwin and fellow producers Kenith Trodd and James MacTaggart. The consortium’s principal contract was with the newly-formed
London Weekend Television but it diversified into film. Garnett wrote and directed the 1980 drama Prostitute, and 1983’s Handgun, about a rape victim in Texas seeking revenge. The choice of subjects was typical of the man. “I’m only interested in love and politics,” he said.
He was, he added, “a revolutionary socialist” who believed society would benefit from “fundamental change”. He accused the BBC of no longer having an interest in “poor people”, except to be “smirked at or derided as chavs”.
During the 1990s, he became chairman of World Productions, for which he executive produced the series Between the Lines as well as This Life and other productions.
His marriage to Topsy Jane ended in divorce. She died in 2014, and he is survived by his partner, Victoria Childs, and sons Will, with Topsy Jane, and Michael, from his second marriage, which also ended in divorce.
I am only interested in love and politics.