My friend Ardan Fisher, who has died aged 79, was a film editor for the BBC during its creative heyday. While working in the music and arts department he edited documentaries such as The Orson Welles Story (1982) and Artists and Models (1986), working alongside BBC stalwarts including Alan Yentob and Leslie Megahey. He then moved into television drama and film after winning a Bafta award for the thriller Edge of Darkness (1985).
Ardan was born in Cambridge to Bryan, bursar of the Bath Academy of Art and his wife, Irene (nee Jefferies), a teacher. He grew up in Corsham in Wiltshire, where his parents moved into a big house on the high street and transformed the spare bedrooms into lodgings for art students. As a result, he was surrounded by unconventional, inquiring minds – and gained a worldliness beyond his years.
At King Edward’s boys school in Bath, Ardan refused to join the cadet force, and turned his attention instead to improving the school’s paltry library, convincing the teachers that he should be entrusted with ordering new books. Tales of adventure and subversive literature filled the shelves thereafter; books that boys might want to read.
Later he studied photography at Salisbury School of Art, then joined the BBC as an assistant editor. After working alongside the director Mike Dibb on the documentary Seeing Through Drawing in 1978, he was promoted to be an editor, eventually moving from music and arts into drama. Among those who benefited from Ardan’s expertise was his former assistant, the film editor Joe Walker, who recalled that Ardan “taught me when not to cut – to give people time to peer into the frame – and that editing could carry meaning, not just continuity”.
After John Birt’s marketisation of the BBC had taken hold and in-house editors were deemed too expensive, in 1995 Ardan became a freelance editor, working in television and on feature films, including on Nature Boy (2000) and The Long Run (2001), forming close working relationships with the directors Tristram Powell, Pip Broughton and Jean Stewart.
He was always in service to the craft and ambitious for the films he was making, but his modesty worked against him in the commercial world outside the BBC. He retired in the late 2000s after a period editing the series Foyle’s War.
Ardan met his wife, Renée van der Vloodt, at the BBC; she survives him, along with their two children, Bevis and Anny.
