Peter Gordon
Award-winning documentary maker who brought the horrors of conflict to the world’s attention
PETER GORDON, who has died aged 73, was a documentarymaker whose films had at their heart a quest for justice. Across the channels on British television he brought into viewers’ living rooms the realities of poverty, the agony of veterans returning from wars, the horrors of repression in an occupied state and many more tales of human suffering and endeavour told in his subjects’ own voices.
A Message from the Falklands, which he produced and directed for ITV’S First Tuesday documentary strand in 1983, was a searing indictment of the Government’s decision to go to war in the South Atlantic the previous year as told through the eloquent, angry letters home written by David Tinker, a Royal Navy lieutenant who was killed in the conflict.
Two decades later, Gordon’s BBC film When Our Boys Came Home (2006) featured three soldiers returning from the invasion of Iraq with physical and psychological injuries.
Two had been wounded in “friendly fire” incidents – one losing a leg, the other receiving severe facial burns and loss of hearing – while the third was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“My regiment have been brilliant,” said one of the injured. “But they’re not the ones who employ me. The MOD are always there to jump on your case when you do anything wrong but, once you turn to them for help, you’re just a number.”
Gordon reflected on another less
than happy military experience in
Dunkirk: The Soldiers’ Story (2004), winner of a Grierson Award for Best Historical Documentary, with British survivors recalling their experiences.
“You were so scared,” said a guardsman. “Not only were you crying – you were probably sick as well from sheer fright. You’re petrified.”
For Asylum (2006), Gordon followed the lives of three refugee families over two and a half years as they settled in the UK. It won Best Documentary honours in both the Amnesty International UK Media and Grierson Awards.
Poverty in northern England was the subject of These Four Walls (2014), while death was firmly at the centre of one of Gordon’s rare excursions abroad.
He produced and directed the multi-award-winning Cold Blood – The Massacre of East Timor for a 1992 First Tuesday documentary filmed by the former Blue Peter presenter Christopher Wenner (under the pseudonym Max Stahl) in the former Portuguese colony under Indonesian military occupation, amid claims of genocide.
The pair entered the country undercover and, while there, Wenner filmed a massacre of protesters by Indonesian troops at the Santa Cruz cemetery in the capital, Dili.
The screening of the documentary brought the world’s attention to the horrors in East Timor.
Peter Mark Hugh Gordon was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on July 10 1945 to Samuel, a naval officer, and Ilse (née Schlesinger), a teacher, and attended Kent College, Canterbury. At Chislehurst College of Art he switched from an art degree to a film course.
In 1969 Gordon joined the BBC as an assistant film editor. On becoming a fully fledged editor, his credits included Sailor (1976), a fly-on-the-wall series about life aboard Ark Royal.
There were also Inside Story documentaries on prisoners’ wives and the difficulties faced by released convicts.
From 1978, he directed for Inside Story and, from 1980, was a producerdirector of the Everyman slot before turning freelance.
At the ITV company Yorkshire Television, as well as making films for First Tuesday throughout its 10-year run (1983-93), Gordon was associate producer of the first series of the pioneering hospital docusoap Jimmy’s, in 1987, and Children of the Holocaust (1994), the stories of five Jewish children who survived the horror.
Back at the BBC, he made War Grave (2001), moving stories of loss told by friends and relatives of those killed in 20th-century conflicts, from the First World War to the Falklands.
Peter Gordon’s final film, made independently, was Still Waters (2017), about a bipolar teacher’s one-room school for Hispanic pupils in New York.
In 1969 Gordon married Paddy Holman; she died in 1975. He married the documentary producer-director Ann Lalic in 1978. She survives him, along with their son and daughter, and the two sons of his first marriage.
Peter Gordon, born July 10 1945, died January 27 2019