The documentary-maker John Pett, who has died aged 94, contributed three powerful episodes to ITV’s epic series The World at War. His style fitted perfectly with the aim of giving viewers an insight into how conflict felt for those immersed in it.
The massive project, three years in the making and screened in 26 episodes over 1973 and 1974, was the brainchild of Jeremy Isaacs, the series’ overall producer at Thames Television. He was intent on combining newsreel images of the second world war with eyewitness testimony from all sides. Alongside its thematic structure and authoritative accounts from the different theatres of war, Laurence Olivier’s narration gave the programmes further gravitas, and Carl Davis’s dark but majestic title music conveyed the looming horrors to come.
Pett was working for Thames Television when he heard about plans for the groundbreaking series and told Isaacs he would like to be involved. “Were you in the war?” asked Isaacs. “No, because I did my national service about 1947, but my brother was in Burma,” Pett replied.
Isaacs immediately assigned him to produce and direct the episode about the Japanese defeat of the British there, It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow, which picked up the story halfway through the war and had a title taken from a Vera Lynn song. Those strains accompanied footage of the “forgotten army” in Burma, following film of the singer’s wartime visit to them.
Pett said the challenge was “to make both strategical and emotional sense in just one hour of viewing”. The result showed soldiers trekking through monsoon rains and thick mud, and hacking off tree branches to create a path in the jungle, “a steam bath closing out the sky, dense, imprisoning and a long way from home”, in the words of John Williams’s script. A former British army sergeant recalled it as “really scary” while a Japanese officer described it as “a friendly place, dark, where you could cover yourself and camouflage yourself”.
Pett included similar firsthand insights in Morning, the episode about D-day – the long preparations, then “hours of death, fear, courage, of plans gone wrong, of rapid improvisation” – and Pacific, on the Americans driving back the Japanese from Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Such events in the big, wide world were a long way from the small north Devon village of Shebbear, where Pett was born. He was the son of Hilda (nee Larkworthy), who acted and sang in local productions, and George Pett, a farm labourer suffering the effects of shell shock and mustard gas from the first world war. Pett credited some of their peasant ancestors – “closet socialists and radicals” – with passing on to them, and him, a “need to dissent”.
More than half a century later he would return to make a Channel 4 drama-documentary, Going Home: Shebbear (1983), recreating a year of his 1930s childhood, when his parents endured poverty that was eased only after they moved 50 miles away to Cheriton Bishop, where they ran a sub-post office together.
Pett absorbed literature, music and radio, and attended Chagford school and two London technical schools that were evacuated during wartime: Borough Polytechnic, in Exeter, then Beaufoy Technical Institute in Budleigh Salterton.
Although he failed his first-year civil engineering exams at the University College of the South West of England, in Exeter (later the University of Exeter), acting in plays there convinced him that his career lay on the stage. After army service (1945-48) with the Intelligence Corps as a field security sergeant, then the Educational Corps, Pett became an actor and assistant stage manager at Salisbury Arts theatre.
A year at the Old Vic school in London (1948-49) was followed by touring with the West of England theatre company (1949-50) and more repertory experience. There were also appearances in a couple of BBC radio plays (1953-54) and a bit part as a wireless operator in the 1955 film Out of the Clouds.
After a brief stint as a reporter and drama and film critic on the Croydon Advertiser, Pett got his break in 1961 when ITV’s newly launched Plymouth-based company, Westward Television, hired him to present its film programme, Stars in the West. He then anchored its news magazine and started making documentaries, regionally and for the network, then for the BBC and, later, Channel 4.
After presenting The Price of a Record (1967), about the ambition that drove Donald Campbell until his death while attempting the world water speed record, he was a prolific director of single documentaries such as The Silent Valley (1971), about the demise of mining leaving a Cornish community devastated (a silver medal winner at the New York international film and television festival); Moonlight Sonata (1980), on the German bombing of Coventry; and The Story of English (1986), charting how Shakespeare’s language was taken to the New World.
After making So Many Children (1966), about a group born with disabilities, he caught up with five of them over the next 20 years in Children No More (1976) as they went through adolescence and One in a Hundred (1986) to see how they were coping with adulthood.
He also wrote and produced The Privileged (1968), a series about the expansion of universities and increase in students, and directed an Omnibus documentary on the cartoonist Ronald Searle (1975), and an Assignment programme, Secrets of the General, on the complicity between the former Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner and western governments (1993).
He also taught at the Northern Media School, Sheffield, and Winchester University until retiring at the age of 85.
In 1955 he married Greta Whiteley, and they had two children; they later divorced. In 1984 he married Victoria Goss. She and their daughters, Alexandra and Philippa, survive him, along with Vanessa and Jonathan, the children of his first marriage.
• Basil John Pett, documentary-maker, born 23 July 1927; died 30 November 2021
