BBC TV producer who wrote a memoir of broadcasting intrigue
ADAM CLAPHAM, who has died aged 82, was a BBC television director and producer for nearly 20 years, before going independent, but in 2002 he “opted out of the rat race” as he put it and moved to a beach house near Mangalore in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka.
At the BBC from the early 1960s until 1982, he worked as producer and editor on series such as Man Alive and Braden’s Week. He became the senior executive producer in the documentaries department and later wrote Blood on the Carpet, a fast-moving memoir full of stories of intrigue, back-stabbing, overweening egos and politics, in which he recalled how he had been instrumental in the bitter palace revolution of 1980 that led to Esther Rantzen being moved out of the general features department run by her husband Desmond Wilcox.
Clapham made many journeys to the Indian subcontinent and in the 1970s won an Imperial Relations Trust bursary to study media in India and a Leverhulme scholarship for research in Sri Lanka. He was one of the first journalists to cover the creation of Bangladesh, and the first to interview Rajiv Gandhi after he became prime minister following the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi.
He became a great friend of the BBC’S former South Asia correspondent, Mark Tully, sharing his love of India, particularly the old India of the Ambassador taxi, and his fascination with the complex legacy of the British Raj.
In 1982 he set up Griffin Productions, making many documentaries in India and in 1991, a children’s series for the BBC, starring Saeed Jaffrey, based on Anita Desai’s novel The Village by the Sea. He also made television films, notably Doomsday Gun (1994), about the Canadian arms designer Dr Gerald Bull and his involvement in Saddam Hussein’s plan to build a supergun.
In 2002 Clapham built himself a house in the seaside village of Hosbettu, near Mangalore, and nine years later moved inland and built a riverside house in Katapadi, a Karnatakan village. “My people have a history of living in cantonments, among more of their own kind; they love duplicating Britain in their little walled colonies,” he told an Indian newspaper: “I am running away from them.”
He wrote two books inspired by his love of India. Beware Falling Coconuts: Perspectives of India (2007) was a compilation of memories, reflections and stories, ranging from tales of Englishmen and women who stayed on after Independence; to “Chota Peg”, an account of India’s confusing prohibition laws; and from some of the more shameful aspects of colonialism, to a touching pen portrait of “Tully Sahib”, who wrote an introduction to the book.
His second book, A Village in South India (2019), was a fictionalised portrayal of life in his village, the simple lives of its inhabitants and about the young people who leave for the big cities and send money home, returning for marriage, for the birth of their children, and eventually, possibly, to die there themselves.
Adam John Clapham was born on April 8 1940 to the industrialist Sir Michael Clapham and Elisabeth, née Rea. After education at Bryanston and the University of Grenoble, he began his career as a researcher with Anglia Television in 1960, then as a scriptwriter at ABC TV before joining the BBC.
One of his early jobs was as assistant to Robert Robinson on Points of View, which, he recalled, had been envisaged as “a convenient fig-leaf to suggest the BBC cared what its viewers thought”, but which Robinson turned into “a most entertaining interlude, with his witticisms directed at the viewers who had written in and the mandarins who paid his salary”.
In 1982 Clapham published As Nature Intended (with Robin Constable), an illustrated history of the nudist movement.
Adam Clapham, born April 8 1940, died October 14 2022