No BBC radio or television producer in the postwar era was more admired within his profession than Michael Bakewell, who has died aged 92 after a slow decline through Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration.
He was the BBC’s first head of plays, appointed in 1963 by Sydney Newman, the dynamic and visionary executive who had arrived from Canadian film and television and ITV to shake up the drama department. He divided it into drama series and single plays. The Wednesday Play was the major anthology series and, on BBC Two, Bakewell ran Theatre 625 (in the new high-definition 625-line format).
Until the end of the 60s, this drama was filmed in black and white, BBC Two being the first European channel to broadcast in colour. Between 1964 and 1968, Bakewell produced more than 100 plays of between 75- and 90-minutes’ duration. In 1966, John Hopkins’s four-part mini-series Talking to a Stranger – which told the story of a dysfunctional family from different viewpoints in different timelines (the cast included Judi Dench, Michael Bryant and Maurice Denham) – was acclaimed by George Melly, writing in the Observer, as “the first authentic masterpiece written directly for television”.
Bakewell’s outstanding roster of productions included plays by Nigel Kneale (whose 1965 version of George Orwell’s 1984 and sci-fi allegory The Year of the Sex Olympics in 1968 were remarkable and innovative), Harold Pinter, Giles Cooper, Alun Owen, Keith Dewhurst, Alan Plater, as well as Ibsen, Strindberg and Athol Fugard.
He had a deep empathy with many of his writers, and deep friendship with several, including Pinter. His wife between 1955 and 1972 was Joan Bakewell, whose own professional relationship with Pinter, as an arts journalist at the BBC, deepened into something much more.
Her clandestine affair, which started in 1962, lasted for eight years and became the disguised subject of the playwright’s Betrayal (1978), an ingenious sequence of startling scenes played out by the interlocked trio in reverse chronological order, so that the play ends with the first hint of underhand play at a party in the Bakewell household.
The rather good 1983 movie, directed by David Jones, had Jeremy Irons as the “best friend”, a literary agent; Ben Kingsley as the publisher equivalent of Bakewell; and Patricia Hodge as his wife, an art gallery owner. None of the characters were much like their life models, and no one would have known about the template had Joan Bakewell not spilled the beans. She felt the play especially was an intrusive exploitation of her private life. Bakewell himself declared to Pinter’s biographer, Michael Billington, that “obviously our friendship was ended by the writing of Betrayal”.
He had stuck his neck out for Pinter shortly after the critical disaster of The Birthday Party in 1958 and fought a great battle with the old guard of the BBC radio drama department to get his early short plays on air before working with him on television. But some damage was repaired – not exactly a rapprochement – when, in 1995, the producer Ned Chaillet, a former Times critic, brought Bakewell and Pinter together on a successful radio version of Pinter’s unmade Proust screenplay.
Michael and Joan divorced in 1972 and, three years later, Michael, a modest, self-deprecating man, married Melissa Dundas, who had been previously married to the imposing character actor Francis de Wolff. They shared their respective children from their first marriages and settled in idyllic domesticity, for three decades in a village on the Essex and Suffolk borders, near Colchester, moving in 2013 to East Sussex. Melissa suggested they were the missing pieces in each other’s jigsaw.
Michael was born in Birmingham and grew up in Sutton Coldfield, where he attended Bishop Vesey’s grammar school. He was the only child of George Bakewell, who worked for the gas board and painted in watercolours, and his wife Elsie (nee Butcher).
After national service with the RAF, he studied English literature at King’s College, Cambridge, where his tutor, George “Dadie” Rylands, guiding spirit of the Marlowe Society, cradle of the Royal Shakespeare Company, commended his “fine mind”.
He graduated in 1954 and joined the BBC Third Programme (which in 1967 became Radio 3), where he found a particularly congenial colleague in the notable translator and script editor Barbara Bray, who was already establishing a network of connections with leading European dramatists including Samuel Beckett. This was the serious, high-minded environment in which Bakewell and Pinter thrived.
Bakewell never stopped working, even when less prominent in the BBC’s television set-up. He directed Vanessa Redgrave and Nyree Dawn Porter in Twelfth Night at the Shaw theatre in London in 1972, then commissioned one last radio play from Christopher Fry, whom he much admired: One Thing More (1986) was about the seventh-century Cumbrian monk Caedmon, suddenly gifted with musical talent. And he even managed a couple of books: a biography of Lewis Carroll (1993) and a study of Lord Byron’s half-sister and lover Augusta Leigh (2000) co-written with Melissa.
He continued to produce and indeed dramatise such big radio serials as Barry Foster and David Buck as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, respectively, in 1978, a much-admired 1981 Lord of the Rings (with Brian Sibley co-writing), adaptations of Chekhov and Tolstoy and, in 1987, a seven-part dramatisation of Mrs Henry Wood’s famously “sensational” 1861 novel of infidelity and double identities, East Lynne, in the author’s centenary (of her death) year, with Rosemary Leach (narrating as Mrs Wood), Maxine Audley and Brian Hewlett.
Michael survived a bout of bowel cancer in 1996, after six months of chemotherapy, and continued to take inordinate pleasure in good food and wine while travelling in France, and in music and the natural world, especially in David Attenborough’s programmes.
Michael is survived by Melissa, by his two children from his marriage to Joan, Matthew and Harriet, and by Melissa’s three children from her marriage to De Wolff, Emma, Adam and Celia.
• Michael John Bakewell, radio and television producer, born 7 June 1931; died 11 July 2023
