Mick Rhodes obituary
When Mick Rhodes, who has died aged 83, arrived in Bristol in the autumn of 1972 to take over as head of the BBC’s Natural History Unit he knew that, back in London, a great deal was expected of him, and that his task was going make him unpopular with practically everyone. He was the new broom brought in from the BBC science series Horizon over the heads of the unit’s own producers to rejuvenate it.
The Natural History Unit had been trying to mount an ambitious global series on the life of the planet, an epic to match series such as The Ascent of Man. What had attracted attention to Mick was that one of his Horizon programmes, The Making of a Natural History Film, had won the recent best factual programme Bafta award and had then gone on to win the international Prix Italia.
The Bristol staff were sceptical of Mick and his limited natural history filming experience. But David Attenborough, who was just standing down from the BBC’s senior management to return to programme making, thought well of him.
The two met and soon were talk-
ing about the crucial additional outside funding needed for a major series. Attenborough had contacts at Warner Bros and Mick followed them up – successfully. Over the next three years, he negotiated the funding, staffing and planning of Life on Earth, which was broadcast in 1979, as the first of the BBC’s blockbuster natural history series fronted by Attenborough and seen all over the world.
In 1977 Mick launched Wildlife on One, a series of half-hour films presented by Attenborough, which ran for 28 years. In that year, too, he instigated Badger Watch, the first of the series using infrared cameras developed from military technology showing how animals live in the wild, and which are now a staple of wildlife television. By the time Mick resigned in 1978, the Natural History Unit was well under way to becoming the internationally renowned production centre it is now.
Mick was born in Wye, Kent. His father, Frederick Rhodes, was a professor of agriculture and his mother, Norah (nee Collier), bred dogs and was a keen gardener. After the second world war, the family settled near Cambridge. Mick went to the local Perse school, where he excelled in cross-country, rugby and sailing, the last of which became an enduring passion. After national service with the army in Germany and in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, he studied zoology at Bangor University.
He was tempted away from PhD studies in 1964, sailing to Greenland and Baffin Island on a 60-year-old pilot cutter with the explorer Bill Tilman. Mick made a film about their journey, which he used as a passport to a job in the BBC Radio science department. One of his programmes there, Mr Blake, on the treatment of schizophrenia, won a Prix Italia and, in 1968, he was offered a job on Horizon.
Over the next three years Mick produced films on everything from rheumatism to rail crashes but soon made his first natural history film, The Wood (1971), about Wytham Woods, 1,000 acres of ancient woodland owned by Oxford University and one of the most researched woodland areas in the country.
This led Mick to The Making of a Natural History Film (1972), about a group of scientist-filmmakers at Oxford Scientific Films who had worked on The Wood and were now working on a film about the life of the stickleback fish. With great natural history filming and a surprisingly dramatic storyline, this modest film won not only a Bafta and a Prix Italia, but an Emmy as well.
After leaving the Natural History Unit in Bristol in 1978, Mick went to the US, partly to set up a US version of Wildlife on One, and partly to be with Barbara Benedek, a New York researcher for the BBC whom he had met while she was on secondment in London, and whom he was to marry in 1986. He was also executive producer of Nova, a US series inspired by Horizon.
In 1981, when I was head of BBC science television, I asked Mick to return to the BBC to run a series of halfhour popular science programmes on BBC1. It was a risky career proposition as only one series was on offer, but Mick accepted the challenge and in the event the show, QED, ran for 17 years.
Its first series was a catholic mix, with films about the Turin shroud and about how to succeed with girls. It was the time of the Falklands conflict, and nuclear tensions between east and west were at a high. Mick responded to both these issues with remarkable films.
He commissioned a film about a group of wounded soldiers returning from the Falklands supply ship Sir Galahad, one of whom, a Welsh Guardsman, was articulate about his own reasons for going to war. That soldier, Simon Weston, became a national hero with the broadcast of Simon’s War and its sequels.
Another QED, A Guide to Armageddon, was a brilliant simulation by Mick Jackson of the effect of a thermonuclear weapon dropped on central London, and prompted Alasdair Milne, BBC director general, to ask the department if it would make a fully dramatised version.
At the time the BBC was being criticised for its continuing failure to show Peter Watkins’s 1965 nuclear film The War Game. Milne wanted a new film to trump the original and it came in the form of Threads, Jackson’s Bafta-winning drama, scripted by Barry Hines, graphically depicting life during a nuclear attack on Sheffield. Mick nursed the production through all its tricky politics.
In 1984, he took over as head of BBC science features and spent five years managing Tomorrow’s World, Horizon, QED and Your Life in Their Hands. His brief also included special projects such as Life Story (1987), the Bafta-winning factual drama about the discovery of DNA starring Jeff Goldblum as James Watson, Tim Pigott-Smith as Francis Crick and Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind Franklin. In 1989, he went back to producing programmes. Among numerous other projects, he thoroughly enjoyed making segments for Gardeners’ World and Country File.
In 1996, Mick and Barbara bought a house in France, where Mick spent his time working on the property, watching birds and gardening. For the next 12 years he divided his time between France and the UK. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2008.
Mick is survived by Barbara; and by Nori, the daughter from his first marriage, to Paula Maria de Lange, which ended in divorce, and two grandsons.
• Michael George Rhodes, filmmaker and television executive, born 6 August 1935; died 1 September 2018