Jonathan Stedall, who has died of cancer aged 84, brought a gentle, sensitive style of documentary-making to TV with his own films and thought-provoking programmes presented by John Betjeman, Malcolm Muggeridge and Alan Bennett. He spent 27 years at the BBC (1963-90) after beginning his television career with ITV, where he directed Betjeman’s West Country (1962-63), presenting impressions of Sidmouth, Bath, Weston-super-Mare, Devizes and other places in the region.
Two decades later, at the BBC, in the retrospective series Time With Betjeman (1983), the poet – by then poet laureate – a year before his death, reflected on his career with extracts from his TV work and an interview with Stedall. Asked if he had any regrets, Betjeman famously replied: “I haven’t had enough sex.”
Stedall’s outstanding original contribution to television documentaries was In Need of Special Care (1968). The two-parter examined the Camphill movement’s work helping people with learning disabilities, first focusing on its school outside Aberdeen, then on Botton Village, in North Yorkshire, a community for adults with special needs. It won the 1969 Society of Film and Television Arts (now Bafta) Robert Flaherty award and an accolade from the United Nations.
One TV critic praised Stedall for “getting a mood of optimism shining through like a beacon”, adding: “It could have been depressing, even morbid. But here we had a skilfully told story of compassion, patience and understanding, with emphasis on all the positive aspects of the children’s life.”
Later, in a different vein, the producer-director was with Alan Whicker for Living With Uncle Sam (1985) a 10-part Whicker’s World series about Britons in the US, which earned a Bafta nomination.
He was with another well-travelled journalist, Mark Tully, to make India – One Man’s Truth (1978), an interview with the prime minister Morarji Desai, and From Our Delhi Correspondent (1982), an optimistic view of the country’s future, countering the western concentration on poverty, corruption and over-population.
They continued together on Tully’s 1994 Great Railway Journeys episode for the BBC, Karachi to the Khyber Pass, then Mark Tully’s Faces of India (1997) for Channel 4, marking the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence.
Born in Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, Jonathan was the son of Mollie (nee Coventry) and Peter Stedall, a director of his family’s tool-manufacturing company. Jonathan’s parents split up when he was young. On leaving Harrow school, he briefly worked in the family business, then studied at the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School). He went into stage management with the rep company at the Grand theatre, Croydon, before becoming an assistant film editor at Pinewood Studios and a floor manager at the ITV companies TWW and ATV.
On rejoining TWW, the commercial network’s franchise holder for south Wales and the west of England, he directed factual programmes. Alongside those with Betjeman, he worked with the writer Gwyn Thomas on portraits of Rhonda, Neath and other south Wales areas (1962-63). In 1963, Stedall moved to the BBC, starting with two months on the current affairs programme Tonight, then producing Footprints (1964), a travel series telling historical stories, with subjects ranging from Don Quixote in La Mancha to Byron and Shelley in Geneva and Louis XIV in Versailles.
Before he made In Need of Special Care, drawn to children’s issues through the work of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, Stedall produced and directed several programmes for the 1966 series The World of a Child, on a children’s home, hospital and boys’ prep school.
He switched to historical figures for Gandhi’s India (1969) and, after securing permission to film with a Russian crew in Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg) and other locations, Tolstoy: From Riches to Rags (1972). He was also given access to photographs and manuscripts from the Tolstoy literary museum in Moscow and a 50-minute silent documentary with footage never previously seen outside the country.
Most poignantly, Tolstoy’s wife, Sonia, is seen arriving at the remote railway station where her husband lies fatally ill with pneumonia, walking up the platform towards the camera and peering into a window, but being waved away by an official and not allowed to see the writer until his dying hours several days later.
The Story of Carl Gustav Jung (1971) was a three-part film portrait of the pioneering Swiss psychologist, narrated by the author Laurens van der Post, whose 80th birthday Stedall marked in 1986 with a documentary on him.
Switching to religion, Stedall directed films for The Long Search series (1977) and – after turning freelance in 1990 – two documentaries for the moral and ethical programme Everyman (in 1992 and 1995). He explored themes such as life and death in his 2009 book, Where on Earth Is Heaven?
In 1982, he made Muggeridge: Ancient and Modern, with the agnostic-turned-Christian looking back over his life. There were also two programmes of Muggeridge interviews, A Week With Svetlana (1982), with Joseph Stalin’s daughter, and Solzhenitsyn (1983), with the Russian novelist.
Later, with Stedall, Bennett brought his observations and wit to Dinner at Noon, a 1988 episode of Byline recalling childhood family holidays at a Harrogate hotel, Portrait or Bust (1994), revisiting another haunt from his younger days, Leeds art gallery, and The Abbey (1995), on everyday life at Westminster Abbey.
With Michael Portillo, he directed three Great Railway Journeys (in 1994, 1996 and 1999) and the Great Britons episode on Elizabeth I (2002).
He also continued to support the Camphill community by making promotional videos, mainly for its Bristol school, St Christopher’s, having moved back to the West Country in 1984.
In 1981, Stedall married Jackie Barton, a statistician and teacher who later became a mathematics historian; she died in 2014. He is survived by his second wife, Maureen (nee Rowcliffe), whom he married in 2021, Tom and Ellie, the children of his first marriage, his sister, Dede (Perdita), and brother, David.
• Jonathan Hugh Pemberton Stedall, documentary-maker, born 20 January 1938; died 21 October 2022
