Pennies from Heaven, Dennis Potter’s groundbreaking 1978 television series about a travelling sheet music-seller of the 1930s, featured Bob Hoskins in daydreaming scenes where he lip-synced to popular songs of the time. Ken Westbury’s cinematography, particularly his use of light, was instrumental in giving those sequences a surreal, dreamlike quality that provided the fantasy element into which the drama – and the character – could escape from reality.
Westbury, who has died of skin cancer aged 96, became a film camera operator and director of photography in television after a grounding in cinema at Ealing Studios on classic comedies such as Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets (both 1949).
Over 40 years, mostly with the BBC, he switched from the police series Z Cars (from 1962 to 1964) and period pieces including The Forsyte Saga (1967) to sci-fi, filming for four different Doctor Who adventures between 1966 and 1978.
When he worked with Potter again on The Singing Detective (1986), directed by Jon Amiel, the New York Times wrote: “Mr Amiel and his cinematographer, Ken Westbury, use every inch of the television screen to make the most of shapes, colours, light and movement.”
Of the drama’s unusual technical demands, Westbury recalled: “We had to pan completely 180 degrees round the [hospital] ward and finish at exactly the right moment on the nurse at the desk as the tune ended.”
Earlier, in television’s black-and-white era, with the flamboyant director Ken Russell, he made programmes for the arts series Monitor. The most notable was The Debussy Film: Impressions of the French Composer (1965), a biopic written by Russell and Melvyn Bragg, with Oliver Reed in the lead role.
Westbury helped to achieve the director’s vision through his stark, sensual images and, again, use of light, such as in a woodland scene where it pierces through tree leaves as Debussy swings in a hammock while his lover plays with a balloon.
Working as a cinematographer shooting on film sometimes took him abroad. For all three series of the female prisoner-of-war drama Tenko (1981-84) and the 1985 feature-length Tenko Reunion, Westbury enjoyed time in Singapore. He was in Switzerland for Dr Fischer of Geneva (1984), starring James Mason, and again for Potter’s lavishly produced adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night (1985), also shot in France.
Ken was born in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, to Kathleen (nee Gibson) and Albert Westbury, a postal worker. In 1942, on leaving Willesden technical college aged 15, he joined the camera workshop at Ealing Studios – famous for its screen comedies – running errands and sweeping the floor. He progressed to clapper loader, working on films such as Champagne Charlie (1944), then focus puller.
During three years’ national service (1945-48) after the second world war, he was a wireless operator and armoured-car driver with the Household Cavalry’s Life Guards, serving in Germany, Egypt and Palestine.
Westbury returned to Ealing Studios as clapper loader on Whisky Galore!, with location filming on Barra, in the Western Isles, Scotland. He clocked up more than 20 other feature films, including the comedy The Man in the White Suit (1951) and the wartime drama The Cruel Sea (1953).
Ealing’s golden era eventually ended and, in 1956, the studios were sold to the BBC, which based its film department there. Westbury joined it and, within a year, was promoted to film camera operator.
He worked on many popular TV series, including the police drama Dixon of Dock Green (from 1961 to 1964), reuniting him with Jack Warner, who as the programme’s title character had starred in the 1950 Ealing Studios film The Blue Lamp, on which Westbury was clapper loader.
Westbury enjoyed particular success shooting The Forsyte Saga, the BBC’s last major drama to be made in black-and-white, which was popular worldwide. His other period productions included the nautical “soap with salt” The Onedin Line (1971), filming along the Devon coast, and When the Boat Comes in (1976), set in the Depression-hit north-east of England between the wars.
He also did location filming for Warship (1973-77), including helicopter shots of the vessel breaking the waves for the opening titles and a rocky journey through the Bay of Biscay, and Donald Wilson’s 10-part adaptation of Anna Karenina (1977), in Hungary.
In 1978, for the wartime-resistance drama Secret Army, he filmed across England’s home counties and in Belgium, while the romantic costume serial Penmarric (1979) took him to Cornwall.
Providing film inserts for Doctor Who included enterprisingly shooting through wagon wheel spokes for the western adventure The Gunfighters (1966) and battling bad weather in a helicopter over the Thames estuary for Fury from the Deep (1968).
On reaching 60, then the BBC’s compulsory retirement age, Westbury turned freelance and filmed for programmes across all channels, from Malcolm Bradbury’s comedy The Gravy Train (1990) on Channel 4, and Chimera (1991) and a 1999 Ruth Rendell Mysteries story on ITV, to the 1994 and 1995 series of Pie in the Sky and 1997 episodes of Silent Witness on the BBC.
As the director of photography on the ITV production of the Catherine Cookson story The Black Velvet Gown (1991), he helped the film win an International Emmy award as best drama. He personally won the Royal Television Society’s 1987 judges’ award.
In 1949, Westbury married Doreen White; she died in 2013. He is survived by their four children, Nigel, Janet, Mark and Simon. The cinematographer John Daly is his son-in-law.
• Albert Kenneth Westbury, cinematographer, born 5 January 1927; died 28 April 2023
